New OS installaion cannot see Virtual Disk drive

[gavinmansell]

I am trying to create a new Windows XP VM on a standalone ESX server using the loca storage. After running through the inital installation startup and getting to "To install windows press Enter" the next screen says

"setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer"

I have read in a few places that this can be due to the wrong selection of either bus logic or LSI logic during the creation of the VM but I have tried both and they both result in the same error.

Is it possible that the problem is the installation media that I am using? Other Installtion disks seem to find the storage as I have setup a 2003 server.

[john23]

If you are using bus logic driver , mount the floppy image which is available in vmimages,and while booting of xp vm,Press F6 to load the driver.

-@m!t

[athlon_crazy · Accepted solution]

Yep for XP u need :

VM -> Edit Setting -> Floppy -> Existing Floppy image in Datastore -> Browse -> vmimages -> floppies -> vmiscsi *.flp

vcbMC-1.0.6 Beta

vcbMC-1.0.7 Lite

[TomHowarth]

Windows XP does not have the required device drivers to see the storeage controllers. you need to attache a Floppy to your VMguest and set it to load the Driver from the VMImages directory. (set your Guest to used BusLogic Driver) then with the CD and the Floppy connected restart the guest and during the Blue Screen Text based install section press F6, this caused the "Select Mass Storage Controller" option page to appear, follow the instructions and carry on.

If you found this or any other answer useful please consider the use of the Helpful or correct buttons to award points

Tom Howarth VCP / vExpert

VMware Communities User Moderator

Blog: www.planetvm.net

Contributing author for the upcoming book "[VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing ESX and the Virtual Environment|http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9780136083214]”. Currently available on roughcuts