Hi Tom, just a little note, using 8GB/USB stick have some limitations...please, check this KB: Installing ESXi 5.x on a supported USB flash drive or SD flash card (2004784) VMware KB: Inst...
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Hi Tom, just a little note, using 8GB/USB stick have some limitations...please, check this KB: Installing ESXi 5.x on a supported USB flash drive or SD flash card (2004784) VMware KB: Installing ESXi 5.x on a supported USB flash drive or SD flash card "Limitation when installing on USB flash drive or SD flash card: When installing ESXi onto a USB flash drive or SD flash card, if the drive is less that 8GB is space, this prevents the allocation of a scratch partition onto the flash device. VMware recommends using a retail purchased USB flash drive of 16GB or larger so that the "extra" flash cells can prolong the life of the boot media but high quality parts of 4GB or larger are sufficient to hold the extended coredump partition." Because of this also check your scratch partition location in your case it will probably be located in ramdisk instead on USB stick. It's always better to have persistent location for scratch partition. Check your host Advanced settings, "ScratchConfig" ( /tmp/scratch/ = RAMDISK)if scratch is redirected to RAM you can change it to some persistent location by following above or this KB: Creating a persistent scratch location for ESXi 4.x and 5.x (1033696) VMware KB: Creating a persistent scratch location for ESXi 4.x and 5.x When this happen to your VM's can you check if you are able to browse host datastore and find VM's folders? If you can see VM folder try to open folder and right-click on .vmx file, then select "Add to Inventory" then you will have your VM back... What you see when you edit (healthy and registered) VM under options tab - > General options. What is in VM config file and working directory path? Just for Info: Changing VM working directory (location of .vmx, vswap, delta.vmdk files) is possible when you add a line to the .vmx configuration file for the virtual machine, specifying a full path to the directory on a datastore for the workingDir option: workingDir = "new_path_location see: VMware KB: Creating snapshots in a different location than default virtual machine directory In the meantime can you check your hardware compatibility with ESXi 5.5 here: VMware Compatibility Guide: System Search Regards, P.