After Mike Laverick posted his experience with ESX Server and USB flash disks in another thread, I decided to figure out how to make it work.
Here's a quick rundown on setting up a USB flash disk (ie. pen drive, flash key, etc.) to install ESX Server.
Requirements:
\- You will need at least a 1 GB USB flash disk.
\- You must have
both
the ESX 3.x CD-ROM and ISO image handy.Steps Required:
boot.iso
file in the/images
directory on the ESX 3.x CD-ROM. Copyboot.iso
into a temporary directory on your hard drive.boot.iso
file to your USB flash drive. On my PC, it's theE:
drive.isolinux.bin
andupdatecd.cfg
files from the USB flash disk.isolinux.cfg
file on the USB flash disk tosyslinux.cfg
syslinux.cfg
file and add the keyword usbto the end of every line that begins withappend
. Here's what the file should look like when you're done:syslinux
.zip file into another temporary directory on your hard drive.cd
command to navigate into thewin32
directory. For example:cd C:\temp\syslinux-3.36\win32</p>
9. Now, run the syslinux program to apply the boot loader and boot sector to the USB flash drive:</p>
syslinux -s e:
( On my PC, my USB flash drive is mounted as drive E: )
10. Finally, copy the ESX 3.x ISO image onto the flash drive:
+copy c:\iso\esx-3.0.1-32039.iso e:\ +
11. Confirm that your USB flash drive contains the following files:
boot.cat
boot.msg
initrd.img
snake.msg
splash.lss
vmlinuz
syslinux.cfg
esx-3.0.1-32039.iso
12. You're all set! Unplug the USB flash drive, configure the BIOS on your server to boot from USB accordingly, and boot 'er up!
13. The ESX installer will detect the USB device and whatever SCSI / disk controllers you have. When the installer asks you what the installation source will be, choose
Hard Disk
.Paul
I ran into the same problem today, I want the option to use one thumb drive and install either ESX or ESXi, which would be great. I have used unetbootin to do just ESXi, and MultiBootISOs for both, but got that same error when trying to install ESX. Any thoughts? Maybe something missing in the config?