Test lab upgrade to U4 - lost access to local SATA storage

[jgalley23]

Wonder if anyone has seen this when upgrading ESX from U3 to U4. My lab ESX servers are built on desktop motherboards, the ASUS P5E-VMDO (quad core procs, 8GB RAM). All the way up to and including Update 3, the ESX installation recognized the onboard SATA controllers and I was able to utilize the local VMFS partitions. In fact, that is where I had installed my Lefthand Networks VSA’s for SRM testing and demo-ing. The upgrade to U4 apparently has updated the SATA drivers for ESX and the servers can no longer see the onboard SATA controllers. The lab is still quite functional due to the Openfiler SAN I have, but I may elect to downgrade the ESX hosts to U3 unless I can find a workaround, so I can still access the local storage.

Anyone got any advice?

[Datto · Accepted solution]

Assuming you're not trying to utilize an onboard RAID function with your SATA, see if your system BIOS has an option to portray the ICH9 controller as something else -- achi if that's avaiable or portray SATA as IDE if that is available and see if ESX 3.5 Update 4 picks it up after a reboot. You'll want to write down the original setting first before making changes so you can put it back if none of that works.

Datto

[jgalley23]

Thanks Datto. I accessed the BIOS on the ESX host and the SATA configuration was presenting as IDE. I switched to ACHI, rebooted the host and my local storage was visible again. Great advice. I appreciate it