How do I log into tech support mode?

[ouch]

I have just downloaded ESXi and tried to install it on a cheap Lenovo workstation. It has an ICH8 controller with SATA HD and ESXi can't see it (in both modes that the BIOS let's you choose).

So I tried ALT-F1 to get into tech support mode, but it asks for a login name and password. I don't know what these are.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

It may be that the driver just can't work with the ICH10 controller. I would suggest a post here if you'd like to see this working - http://communities.vmware.com/message/947521#947521.

[cefabio]

Hi Dave,

can you explain me where I can write the commands that you learn here?

The ESX3i don't have a shell, right?

If I must write in the oem.tgz , can you make an example of how I must make it?

And if I need to re-master the ISO CD to save our fix, I must use winimage?

Thanks for all

Fabio

[melsal73]

Hi

I have a xw4600 workstation with an ICH9R controller. I followed all your instruction - booted with a pen drive but when i tried to copy the oem.tgz to the bootbank a message

says "cant cd to bootbank ". I cannot locate the bootbank!!

What am i doing wrong?

[Dave_Mishchenko]

If you using the USB drive to install ESXi onto a HD then you'll just need to put oem.tgz into the root folder. After the install onto HD, you'll need to boot the host with a linux live CD and replace oem.tgz on the Hypervisor1 partition.

[melsal73]

Hi Dave

Thanks for your support. Im new to this and this is the way that im doing it. I formatted my pen drive with FAT32 and made it bootable with SYSLinux following a procedure I found here . Then I copied the contents of the cd into the pen drive, changed the bios of the xw4600 workstation to AHCI and booted from the pen drive successfully. Followed the procedure by pressing ALT + F1, but at this point i couldnt find how can I insert "unsupported" but managed to enter the username 'root' with no password. Followed all the procedure until I came to the step of copying the statement cp oem.tgz /bootbank/oem.tgz - "can't cd to bootbank" message appears. So I tried to copy oem.tgz to the root with "cp oem.tgz /oem.tgz" to see waht will happen and find out the the file was copied into the root - i verified this by issuing the command "ls" then chmod 755 oem.tgz from the root again. Now ?? I dont know what to do. If i reboot i will loose the oem.tgz as it is not on my pen right now, its in the root but I assume in the RAM of the pc?? At this point my Sata drives are still not recognized so I cant install to them. Could it be that I need to create partitions on my pen drive? Im lost here Dave.

Thanks

Melvin

[Dave_Mishchenko]

Before you do down the road too far with oem.tgz, what model of SATA controller do you have and what is the PCI id for it - http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/find_PCI_ID.php?

[melsal73]

The model is Intel ICH9R. When I executed "lspci" command the device id was 8086:2922. I found it in the HCL from VMWARE and says that ESXi can be installed with an AHCI bios configuration. I found this at http://communities.vmware.com/message/1065437.

[gagough]

When I get to the line:

cp oem.tgz /bootbank/oem.tgz

I get the response:

unable to open '/bootbank/oem.tgz' : No such file or directory