What makes ESXi different?Ī07 is the latest while A06 was a 'internal release' or something of that sort. I mentioned in another thread that the ESX Server 3.5.0 installer boots without issue. latest BIOS to-boot (A07) - What did you do to get it to boot properly in ATA mode? I've tried nearly everything, which includes some random pokes at adding things like acpi=off, noacpi, and such.Īnyhow, what I might do is re-download the ISO and perhaps net-boot the process, just in case it's something funky with our cd's or drives.Īlso to note: I've tried this on a second T3400 (A03 BIOS) and it still refuses to boot any farther than the cd boot menu then a hard lock. If I select any other option like RAID or Autodetect/AHCI which I know will not work, it boots into the CD to install but obviously cannot find the hard drive. Autodetect/ATA is selected in the Dell BIOS and only when it is, does it actually freeze/hard-lock like this. It freezes right after selecting 'ThinESX Installer' on the boot menu. I have one of these here, and I'm attempting to install ESXi U2 on it with no luck. You mentioned that you were able to at least install ESXi on a Precision T3400? (Unless I'm mistaken) Has anyone got ESXi working on a Dell Precision withOUT the SaS RAID controller option, with just native SATA or AHCI or RAID from the integrated ICH9R controller? I have tried booting the ESXi install CD with the machine configured both with the ICH9R in AHCI mode and with the ICH9R in RAID mode - same 'Unable to find a supported device' error. The Dell Precision has Intel's X38 Express chipset and ICH9R controller. ESXi 3.5.0 gives the error 'Unable to find a supported device to write the VMware ESX Server 3i 3.5.0 image to'. This hardware certainly has more power than my existing three such machines combined!īut. I have this crazy idea of running a real virtual platform on the hardware, supporting a workstation image, a server image, and maybe even a home theatre / media center image. I just purchased a Dell Precision T3400 workstation, and upgraded its default Core 2 Duo E4600 (no hardware virtualization support) CPU to a Core 2 Quad Q6600 to have plenty of CPU power and Intel's hardware virtualization support.

Dell t3600 sas controller driver