ESX Server 3.0.1 Unable to install from CD, but will boot from the CD

[randall310]

I have been trying to install ESX server 3.0.1 on a Dell PowerEdge 1600SC server. It has dual Xeon 2.4 gHz CPUs and 4GB of ram, ana LSI Logic SCSI controller and a Dell PERC RAID controller.

The system boots from the CD I burned from the ISO image downloaded from the VMWare website.

After the ESX server installation routing begins and after selecting such things as language, keyboard, mouse, etc, it asks for the Installation source.

"What type of media contains the packages to be installed/

Local CDROM <--I selected this since it was able to boot from it in the first place.

Hard drive

NFS Image

FTP

HTTP

After selecting Local CDROM, and error is returned:

"THe VMware ESX Server 3 CED was not found in any of your CDROM drives.

Please insert the VMWare ESX Server 3 CD and press OK to Retry.

When I press OK to retry, the CDROM drive spins up and the activity light flashes rapidly.

My guess is that it can read the CD but is looking for a disk lable or something that the ISO image burned to the CD did not create. I have downloaded the ISO image again and burned the CD again, still get the same error during the GUI install when selecting the CDROM as the installation media type

I have also tried the following:

Selected FTP as the media source.

FTP Setup

FTP Site Name: 192.168.1.63

Red Hat directory ESX

I tried both an anonymous and a non-anonymous FTP login

I looked on the FTP server and saw the rhinstall@ was connected with the anonymouse attempt and domain\user was connected with the non-anonymous attempt.

The result both times was: ERROR: Unable to retrieve FTP://192.168.1.63//ESX/VMware/base/netstg2.img (I verified that the file was in fact in the path)

OK

Error: Unable to retrieve the install image. OK

I then selected HTTP as the media source.

HTTP Setup

Web Site Name: 192.168.1.63

Red Hat directory ESX

OK

I got the same error as with the FTP attempts.

I did create a virtual directory to point to the ESX directory in IIS

Do anyone have any idea why this is failing?

Thanks,

Randy

[RParker]

Trade out the CD drive from another newer machine. It could be that the drive in that 1600 isn't reading multi-layer from a burned ISO, and that could be why it's not reading.

I would swap the CD rom drive, and try it again.

[bister]

Another possibility is that the cdrom drive can't handle the CD because of the burning speed it was created with. You can try to burn at a lower (maybe lowest) burning speed and try again.

If the DRAC offers a feature to mount ISO images you could try using this.

Message was edited by:

bister

[wtreutz]

have you checked your downloaded ISO-Image with an md5-checksum program to verify it is not corrupted???

[rfunk]

I would try to boot the cdrom on another system such as your desktop to see if it's the cd or the cd drive

[randall310]

Thanks for the suggestions to replace the CDROM drive. I installed a CDR/DVD in the server and ESX installed without a hitch.

One thing I negleted to do during the setup routine that probably would have given me a clue about the CDROM drive was to do a Media Check.

The default is SKIP and I always did.

Thanks again, problem solved.

[Haneska]

Hi, i wanted to start working on ESX3 but as i dont have a machine ready for that, i installed MS virtual server and i have created a virtual server.

I mounted the ISO image "images\boot.iso" and it is booting fine, however, after selecting the media source it keeps asking me to insert the cd!!.

I burned the whole ISO image to a blank cd and now i have the boot ISO image mounted + the whole ISO image on a CD in my drive, and it keep asking me to insert the CD.

What else can i do?

Your help will be highly appreciated.

Hany