Uninstall ESXi Server

[beau2010]

Simple enough, how do I uninstall ESXi server?

[Troy_Clavell]

well, a simple way, if you want to blow away everything is to just blow away the array and create a new one. If an HP server, hit f8 then delete the array, create a new one.

[Jasin2069]

Yeah, Kinda like asking how to uninstall windows, or any other operating system. You don't uninstall, you format it.

You can break the array (if you have one) as mentioned above, or just put in the dvd of the operating system you want to put on the server (Windows) and format/install from there.

[chrzimmer]

Hello, this is not that easy !!!

I tried to install my SuSE Linux Enterprise Server and the installer said, that it can't manipulate the existing (ESXi 3.5) partitions.

All efforts with parted, fdisk and gparted were useless. None of them was able to read the partition tables of my 3 SATA disks. Switching back

to ESXi I saw all partitions.

After some searching in the web I found a hint to write blocks to the partition with "dd" to delete the partition table. That worked fine for the drives that contained ESXi datastores (two of the SATAs). But the disk containing the hypervisor SW and a datastore can't be recovered by this method. The dd command says the file system is read-only.

Any hints to get rid of the ESXi ? Thanks in advance.