Lost ability to boot from ISO - ESXi 6.0

[nick3123]

Hi Guys

Strange issue i'm having I have been able to create a bunch of VM's though for some reason now when I go to boot from datastore ISO the VM doesnt seem to be able to detect the CD-ROM properly.

I can see the cd rom drive when I go into the bios though there is no + next to it indicating something is connected. Yes the connected box is ticked, and this has worked before though I can figure out why it has now stopped.

[brunofernandez1]

what about if you connect the ISO to a running VM?

Does the OS recognizes the drive?

[nick3123]

Same thing happens if I connect the iso to the running vm.

If I go straight into the BIOS I can see [CD ROM] under one of the IDE device toggles, also I can see CD ROM in the boot devices list, though I am unable to expand it.

If I choose CDROM as the boot device it just skips and goes to the next available, which is pxe boot.

If I go into one of my copies of windows already installed, I can connect to ISO's. It just doesn't seem to work when I create new VM's and need a fresh boot.

[brunofernandez1]

maybe the ISO is not bootable?

[nick3123]

I have tested with a few different ISO's that are definitely bootable.

[npadmani]

VM -> Edit Settings

go to CD/DVD drive - check 'Connected' and 'Connect at Power on' boxes

see if this works.

I know it's very much basic things, you might have taken care of it already as I can see you went upto BIOS of the VM too to check boot order etc, if so, I am not able to think of anything else at the moment. but i have seen this basic thing being missed sometimes.

[Montee]

Did you ever get this figured out?
I came to the forum to start a very similar thread...
Since virtual CD/DVD drives can only be managed by the web client now, I can't tell my ESXi host to connect a particular ISO image to a particular VM to have it boot up from that anymore.

Has anyone come up with a solution to this very obvious problem yet?
...or is there something I'm missing?

EDIT: Actually, I think I just figured it out....
VM props \ hardware \ add \ cdrom \ from iso

[mark_ironbow]

Funny, I have the same problem and have been looking for an answer for a while. The ISO is a good, bootable ISO. I have determined that. It is a Windows Server 2008 R2 ISO. Datastore it resides on is an NFS datastore. But I have also moved it to a local ESXi host datastore and tried. Same thing.

Even if I set the CD-ROM device in VM BIOS as first boot device. Even if I press "Esc" at VM boot for boot menu and select the CD-ROM drive. Nothing works.

Just a dead cursor in the top left corner.

The suggestion of adding hardware to VM, and adding CD-ROM drive point to ISO is not the answer.

In my case, this is nested ESXi, but why that would matter, I do not know.

[coafark]

I still see this is an issue when trying to boot an ISO to install an OS.

ESXi 6.0.0, 338124

I've tried the fat client and the web (IE and Firefox).  Also running as Administrator.

From shared ISO (my PC) and from Datastore located one.

Best I can do is get it to "show" up in BIOS but it doesn't show as something mounted , just "CD-DROM Drive", but no + next to it showing that its actually there or an ISO on it.

Anyone else get this fixed/worked around yet?

[Philip12]

Ran into an issue booting to a DVD.

What I had to do was set the VM Options | Boot Options | Boot Delay to 5000 milliseconds. Mount your CD/DVD as you normally do.

Power on the VM, you'll see the Post BIOS screen, hit ESC to bring up the boot menu. Select CDROM. Then it booted from the DVD.

Going into the Setup BIOS screen as I have done in the past did not work. Also, the Boot Delay was set to 0 for this VM originally, so I never got to press ESC to get to the other boot menu.

Hope this helps someone.

[mariusherlea]

! !ESXi version:

6.5.0

HP

Model

ProLiant MicroServer Gen8

sd card 32 gb

hdd 300 gb installed in first bay.

I install Esxi from USB stick into a sd card. I create VM and I dont have option to boot from iso. Please help. Thank you. ! ! At boot it try to boot from pxe.

[Cappej]

thanks a lot!

my dalay time was set to 0, so the boot was too fast! Now with 5000 I've got the time to connect the iso file from the ESXi Client

Thanks a lot again

Marco