Installer does not detect SD or USB flash drives

[safc1977]

I am trying to install VMWare Vshere ESXi 5 onto an SD / USB flash drive but whenever I run the installer it does not detect either SD or USB flash drives. I have tried different USB and SD cards and also different installation media. I have tried SANDisk SD cards and Kingston USB flash drives. The installer only detects local hard drives.

Does the flash drive have to be formated with a specific filesystem or anything I am missing?

[continuum]

did you try to create the USB-stick on a second host or inside a VM  ? - maybe that helps

maybe USB-controller is disabled in BIOS ?

[safc1977]

I already tried to install onto the USB stick from a Dell Poweredge R510 and also a Dell Latitude E6410 notebook. Neither worked.

All USB devices are enabled in the BIOS.

My method was to burn the EsXi ISO to CD > boot the server from the CD > Select a Disk to install or Upgrade > and here I only see the local SATA hard disk available. USB and SD cards are not visible.

[continuum]

does a Linux LiveCD see USB devices on that server ?

[safc1977]

Ok I managed to get esxi installed onto the SD card using an SD > USB adapter. The installer then recognised the card as available storage.

The original USB stick I was using had some inbuilt encryption that stopped esxi installer seeing it. Once I purchased a new bog standard USB stick it worked without any issues. I picked up TDK TRANS-IT usb 2.0 flash drives that I can confirm work.