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VNightMare
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ESX 3.0.2 installation warning

We are trying to install ESX 3 x on an HP DL 380 with two 72GB ultra 320 SCSI drives. Both Fibre HBA I disabled through the HP DL 380 bios there this was recommended when installing ESX 3 before presenting it to the SAN. After the inittial reboot the ESX install process brings up the option to install using text mode or graphical mode. We took the second option and are getting the following error message: Unable to dertimine geometry of file/device/dev/cciss/c0d2. You should not use parted unless you REALLY know what you are doing. Anyone that knows what this message means? We are getting this message when the mouse option screen appears and continues untill the MBR option screen appears.

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TCronin
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Try enabling the HBA(s) and unplugging the fibre. That's actually the suggested method. It sounds like the driver is still trying to load but can't find the hardware correctly.

There is a whitepaper on xtravirt.com that gives a procedure to not load the drivers at all during install, but I find unplugging the fibre much easier.

What actual model HBA are you using and is it on the HCL?

Tom Cronin, VCP, VMware vExpert 2009 - 2021, Co-Leader Buffalo, NY VMUG

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aerodevil
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cciss is the internal Smart Array, so that is your internal drives.

If this is a brand new install and you had something on the disks before, just delete and recreate the logical drive in the array setup. Since it's just two drives, I guess you're mirroring. This way, you have a blank, unformatted disk presented to ESX during the install. If you use the graphical installation, it will then ask you if you want to "initialize" the disks. Then you can take the default partitioning or choose advanced to create your own. The default should work fine for most.

Josh Atwell @Josh_Atwell http://www.vtesseract.com http://github.com/joshatwell/
VNightMare
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After deleting and creating a new partition and re-installing ESX 3.01 again I did not have the previous error message show up again.

After accepting the defaults the following error message showed up after everything loaded.

Unable to load qla2300 module

0:00:01:08:198 CPU1:1031 MOD: 490: initialization for qla2300_707 failed with -19

0:00:02:25:241CPU1:1032 MOD: 490: initialization for qla2300_707 failed with -19

Any suggestions?

Thanks

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TCronin
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Try enabling the HBA(s) and unplugging the fibre. That's actually the suggested method. It sounds like the driver is still trying to load but can't find the hardware correctly.

There is a whitepaper on xtravirt.com that gives a procedure to not load the drivers at all during install, but I find unplugging the fibre much easier.

What actual model HBA are you using and is it on the HCL?

Tom Cronin, VCP, VMware vExpert 2009 - 2021, Co-Leader Buffalo, NY VMUG
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VNightMare
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This was exact the problem, after enabling the HBA's and disconnecting the fibre + reboot, it came up clean.

Thanks

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