Installation issues ESX 3.5 Update 3

[J-Dubb]

I am having issues installing ESX 3.5 update 3 on a supermicro box. The system board is a X7DCA-L and I have an Adaptec 3805 controller with 8 SATA drives connected to it. What happens is when I try to install, I select gui install then it appears to try and load the aacraid_esx30 driver, hangs for about 15 minutes then asks to check the CD. Skip or check, same result, waits another 15 minutes loading aacraid_esx30 drivers then pops up a message saying no disks found, and it gives you a list of drivers that you can manually load. I found a few articles that state to disable acpi in the BIOS because of a conflict, I have done this and get the same result. The weird thing is that I can install ESX3i without an issue. Any help would be appreciated.

[SuryaVMware]

Hi,

Did you ever tried to install an ESX version on this Physical Machine? 3805 is definatly in the compatablie list, should work. can you only connect fewer SATA disks and try? like only 1 or 2 instead of 8 disks?

Also letme know what is the supermicro model #. I know you have given the board #.

Regards,

Surya

[J-Dubb]

What I ended up doing is during the ESX install, I entered "ESX noapic" at the select install screen, and this allowed me to get past the hanging driver. Then on the screen where it is writing the boot parameters, I removed "noapic". Seemed to work ok.

Thanks,

JW