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kdewitt
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trying to create an ESXi datastore on local drive. Error during configuration of host: Failed to update disk partition information

I'm a newbie on ESXi and not sure what to do to make ESXi correctly partition my 500 SATA drive correctly.

I'm setting up a lab unit to do some testing for ESXi and ESXi is not partitioning the drive quite correctly or it doesn't seem to see a correct partition in order to create a datastore.

This system was able to correctly identify and configure a datastore on a small 80GB seagate SATA drive however, that isn't quite enough storage so i swapped out the hard drive and tried to re-install ESXi on the new hd.

I'm using a thumb drive to boot ESXi from and it does come up and configures the intel pro1000 pci ethernet card correctly. also correctly id's the cpu and memory. all seems fine and it even is able to see the hard drive.

here's some screenshots of the process i'm going through to make my datastore...

in this picture- under the column heading "available" is says "none" also, under heading "san identifier" it says "not applicable" - i'm guessing this isn't quite right???

and bummer - failure???

i've tried to go into the bios to see if there are some settings i need to do to get this hard drive set up... i just don't understand enough about ESXi to know why the hard drive isn't being found and configured correctly. is this a bios issue w/ my system or an ESXi issue?

pls help!

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Dave_Mishchenko
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Generally you don't have to, but it might be worth booting it with something like a Linux live CD and then using gparted or other to wipe all partition info on it.

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kdewitt
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I've also gone back into the ESXi command line using the following steps..

1) on the ESXi 3.5 box, from the command line monitor, hit "Alt-F1" from here, you see a command line-like flow of statements.

2) type the word "unsupported" (note - you won't see what you are typing on the screen so you have to just assume you're typing correctly")

3) from here, you get a Warning message - "Tech Support Mode is not supported..." and you're asked for your password: enter your pw and now you're at a command line prompt as root.

4) typing fdisk -l i get the following;

Disk /dev/disks/vmhba1:0:0:0: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes

255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

/dev/disks/vmhba1:0:0:1 1 523 4193280 6 FAT16

Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.

/dev/disks/vmhba1:0:0:2 523 537 112640 fc VMKcore

Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.

/dev/disks/vmhba1:0:0:3 537 60802 484080632+ fb VMFS

Disk /dev/disks/vmhba32:0:0:0: 1015 MB, 1015021568 bytes

64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 968 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 2048 * 512 = 1048576 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

/dev/disks/vmhba32:0:0:1 5 750 763904 5 Extended

/dev/disks/vmhba32:0:0:4 * 1 4 4080 4 FAT16 <32M

/dev/disks/vmhba32:0:0:5 5 52 49136 6 FAT16

/dev/disks/vmhba32:0:0:6 53 100 49136 6 FAT16

/dev/disks/vmhba32:0:0:7 101 210 112624 fc VMKcore

/dev/disks/vmhba32:0:0:8 211 750 552944 6 FAT16

Partition table entries are not in disk order

~ #

it appears as though the bios is not seeing the hard drive correctly? or is that ESXi that isn't correctly seeing the hard drive? notice that it says

Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.

and again ...

Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.

so this seems like just like maybe the driver isn't correctly loading for the SATA drive?? not sure why the 80GB seagate drive worked correctly though. the 80GB drive is Seagate Barracuda 7200 part number - ST380815AS.

does this information help anyone in diagnosing the problem?

kd

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Dave_Mishchenko
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Did you have a prior OS / partition on the problem drive?

kdewitt
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Hi Dave,

No, this hard drive is a new drive I purchased from microcenter from their OEM department bin. As far as I know, it's a clean drive w/ no O.S. Do I have to format the drive to get it to work initially? Does this seem like a bios setting issue? I know the 80GB drive was previously formated using suse linux kernel version was 2.6.X

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Dave_Mishchenko
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Generally you don't have to, but it might be worth booting it with something like a Linux live CD and then using gparted or other to wipe all partition info on it.

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kdewitt
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Thanks very much Dave for the hint. It does appear now that ESXi needs to see a pre-formated hard drive in order to create a datastore. I wasn't quite sure if ESXi had all the modules of a standard linux o.s. but after thinking about it, 32MB is a pretty dang small version of a linux o.s. so naturally, it worked once i used Gparted to create a new partition on my hard drive.

Again, here's the basic steps;

1) download the gparted live iso directly from sourceforge.net - http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115843&package_id=271779

2) burn the iso to a proper bootable CD. for this, i used my mac and just used diskutility.app. here's the steps;

a) put a blank writable cdrom into your mac's dvd drive - you can safely ignore the popup window to browse to it using finder.

b) open Applications &gt; Utilities &gt; disk utility.app

c) drag the gparted iso image you downloaded from the web into the left hand section of the file system tree. now select the gparted iso image

d) click on the "burn" button. mac knows how to handle data versus iso images so there is no need to configure anything. wait til it burns the disk and then the mac will eject it when done.

3) use the gparted iso cdrom to boot your machine. just keep all the default settings and wait til you get to the option to open in either command line mode or X windows. I choose Xwindows (usually i just use the command line mode - which is easier!)_

4) select your partition. (the rest is kind of fuzzy because i'm going from memory here. but the basic steps are...)

5) using the menu options,"create a new partition" from the menu items

6) name your new partition something

7) click apply and wait. on my 500gb unit, it took about 10 minutes. (1.6GHz celeron CPU)

😎 now that's done go back into your windows client and browse to the IP address of the ESXi server.

9) now just click on the blue link to "create a new datastore", I chose to use the local drive versus a networked drive...

10) run through the wizard and select the hard drive you just formated. NOTE - weird that the screen looks identical to the one the first time through....i.e. it still didn't appear to me that ESXi had read the drive correctly.

and waalaah! it worked. i now have my 500GB drive loaded up on my ESXi box!

Thanks once again dave for the hint!

kd

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stanly26
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Hi

I reached till last step. I have partitioned a 15gb to test from the available space in ex 3; but new partion in not listing while am creating the data store. I only have a local SATA hard disk with a free space of 233 GB and i just partitioned a 15gb to make a data store but didnt succeed.

Kindly see the attachment.

Thanks & Regards

Stanly

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BenjaminJohnso1
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Thanks for the hint.

I used gparted to delete existing paritions, then created a new partition ext2. Then I could add it ok in storage.

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