Problem istalling ESXI 3.5 probably SATA disc

[hloti]

i was just trying to install ESXI 3.5 on my laptop computer to try it out. i booted using the cd and every thing went well with loading the disc, etc. but just as it was getting ready to install, it complaint about not having found a media to install it. i have an inspiron 1521 which has a SATA hard disk and i am pretty sure thats why it did not install it because SATA discs are normally hard to detect by some software.

Does any one know what to do? on Inspiron it is also not possible to switch off the sata and turn on ATA.

i do appreciate to get any feed back on this.

cheers

Hloti

[Dave_Mishchenko]

Welcome to the VMware Community forums. Take a look at these. Once you have ESXi installed you will need a 2nd PC on which to install the VI client which you'll use to manage your ESXi host. If you just want to get familiar with ESXi you can run it in a VM on VMware Workstation or Server.

http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/Hardware_support.php

http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/find_PCI_ID.php

http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/ESXi_install_to_IDE_drive/ESXi_install_to_IDE_drive.php

[Deaken]

AFAIK you can normally install ESXi only on SCSI disks. If you want to install it on other disks see one post up here ^

Deaken

[Dave_Mishchenko]

ESX(i) 3.5 started to include some SATA controllers. VMFS is not supported on these (Intel ICH support - http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1008673) but it will work for ESXi to have VMFS on SATA controllers like Intel ICH* and nVidia MCP. You can even hack the install to create VMFS on IDE.