Mounting root failed. Dropping into basic maintenance shell

[vmsystem]

Hi,

I have purchased AMD Phenom X4 955 3.2GHZ processor with supporting gigabyte GA-MA785GM-US2H mother board / 6GB DDR2 RAM / 500GB SATA drive for learning Vmware ESX 3.5 product.

In the above configuration, I have installed windows xp 64 bit operating systems and continue to installed vmware workstation 6.5.

From the VM workstation, I can able to install ESX3.5 update2, but I unable to start properly, please refer the below mention error.

“Mounting root failed. Dropping into basic maintenance shell.

To collect logs for VMware, connect a USB storage device and

run 'bin/vm-support '.

Machine will be rebooted when you exit from this shell.”

The same was tested in the windows 2003 Enterprise Edition server / windows 7 32bit / windows 7 64bit also, Please help me to resolve the issue.

[conyards]

Below is an excellent guide/link from xtravirt for installing ESX 3.5 successfully into VMware Workstation 6.5.

http://xtravirt.com/xd10004

[wila]

Hi,

Please attach the vmware.log file from the ESX guest so we can see why it is not working.

--

Wil

_____________________________________________________

VI-Toolkit & scripts wiki at http://www.vi-toolkit.com

[vmsystem]

Thanks every one,

Now I can install ESX4.0 update1 in VMware Workstation 7 and able to access through Vsphere client. Later the ESX & VI shown some error.

Please refer the attached error and help me to resolve the issue.

desktop OS: Windows 7 32-bit home premium edition.

Hardware:

AMD Phenom X4 955 3.2GHZ processor

gigabyte GA-MA785GM-US2H mother board

6GB DDR2 RAM

500GB SATA drive

please suggest suitable windows OS as per the above mention Hardware spec.

[wila]

Hi,

The windows host OS is not relevant, it should work the same on all. VMware workstation is the container that gives you the abstraction from the host OS.

I see you switched to VMware workstation 7, which makes sense as it supports ESX as a guest in contrary to Workstation 6.5.

Umm it's hard to say what is biting you as the screenshots don't help much... please attach a vmware.log file found in the folder of your virtual ESX VM as requested before as it has the nitty gritty on what might be wrong.

I'm not sure if NUMA is supported in a virtual ESX, so that error might be expected. You should however be able to connect using the VI client and start up some guests, which you seem not to be able to do.

--

Wil

_____________________________________________________

VI-Toolkit & scripts wiki at http://www.vi-toolkit.com

[vmsystem]

Thanks.

After running service vmware-webAccess start -- i can able to access VI client. Please refer the attached log file further proceedings.

[continuum]

did you try

monitor.virtual_mmu = "hardware"

in the vmx-file ?




___________________________________

VMX-parameters- Workstation FAQ -[ MOA-liveCD|http://sanbarrow.com/moa241.html] - VM-Sickbay

[vmsystem]

Yes. But again same error.

[wila · Accepted solution]

Hi,

So if I understand you correctly then the "ESX in a box" setup now works for you, except you are seeing that one NUMA error?

I'm not convinced that NUMA is supposed to work in this environment, but I have no hardware here to test and verify your findings.

NUMA support requires specific BIOS and hardware features on the mainboard.

Here's some more documentation on it.

Ensuring your hardware is functioning correctly

VMware ESX Server Internal Monitor Error *** vcpu-0:ASSERT bugNr=17332

Error in the VMkernel log and on the ESX console: TSC:27393110 CPU 0:0 ACPI:998: No memory detected ...

The second document has notes on how-to disable the error if it bothers you.

You might also want to try increasing memory on the ESX guest and see if that helps.

--

Wil

_____________________________________________________

VI-Toolkit & scripts wiki at http://www.vi-toolkit.com

[vmsystem]

Thanks.

After upgrade the Motherboard BIOS, ESX 3.5 update 2 & ESX 4 update 1 is working.

Now the 4 Core processor also looks good.

Thanks everyone............. I really happy to the valid answer.