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Dinty
Contributor
Contributor

ESXi 3.5 Does Not See 2nd Hard Drive

I recently converted my Pentium 4 system to ESXi. I got ESX loaded by I only see one of my two 1TB hard drives when I connect to the system via VIC. How do I add a SATA if it is not recognized automatically?

These hard drives are new but the workstation previously had 2 150GB drives in a RAID 1 configuration. These were managed with Intel Storage Utility. Could my chipset be RAIDing the new drives automatically?

Thanks for any help.

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AntonVZhbankov
Immortal
Immortal

It is possible that your drives automatically became a mirrored RAID, so you auctually have 1TB of space only.


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VMware vExpert '2009

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Dinty
Contributor
Contributor

That is entirely possible. How would one check the current RAID configuration of their hard drives?

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AntonVZhbankov
Immortal
Immortal

Reboot machine and enter RAID BIOS?


---

VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

EMCCAe, HPE ASE, MCITP: SA+VA, VCP 3/4/5, VMware vExpert XO (14 stars)
VMUG Russia Leader
http://t.me/beerpanda
Dinty
Contributor
Contributor

Any hints on how to do that? I entered the general BIOS and didn't see any RAID configuration menus in there.

The boot menu offers a hard drive check and does in fact show two hard drives connected to the board. So I am reasonably sure they are both working.

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Dinty
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So I switched my BIOS setting to RAID ON (which forces the RAID utility to display on boot up) and I hit ctrl I to enter. The RAID setup utility does see both drives and says they are not part of a RAID array. So why does ESX only see one drive?

A special thanks to my Dell Dimension 8400 manuals. They helped me get into my RAID utility. I guess that's why you keep that stuff.

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Dinty
Contributor
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Found it. On the configuration tab I had to click add storage and the drive appeared. I guess it did not show up by default since it was not formated.