VMWARE ESXi PANIC: Failed to find HD boot partition

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/213486

  •  03-07-2019
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Question

I've got problems installating the VMWARE ESXi Server. The Installation finishes without any error messages and prompts me to reboot. After pressing Enter the System reboots. While booting through the yellow loading-screen it switches to black and displays the following Error-Message:

PANIC: Failed to find HD boot partition

All modules have been loaded without any errors. After typing unsupported into the console the busybox comes up. I tooked a look into the /dev/disks directory but no disk devices gets listed in difference to the installation process. Switching to the system-console during installation both sata disks on MPC51 controller are shown. The controllers are named vmhba0 and vmhba32.

Does anyone know how to solve the problem?!

Hardware is a ESPRIMO P5615 (nForce4) from Fujitsu-Siemens.

Was it helpful?

Solution

The only solution I have found is to run the server from a thumb drive and use the embedded hard drive to store your virtual servers. This solution worked for me.

To achieve this in this way you will need:

  • A USB thumb drive 1GB or larger
  • An active Linux machine (or, use a liveCD option on your PowerEdge such as Knoppix or Gentoo LiveCD)

Mount your ESXi ISO:

mount -t iso9660 -o loop VMware-VMvisor-InstallerCD-3.5.0_Update_2-110271.i386.iso /mnt/esx

Write the installer file to the thumb drive:

tar xvzf /mnt/esx/install.tgz usr/lib/vmware/installer/VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_2-110271.i386.dd.bz2 -O | bzip2 -d -c | dd of=/dev/sdb

Assumptions here (adjust to your settings):

  • /dev/sdb is where your thumb drive resides
  • VMware-VMvisor-InstallerCD-3.5.0_Update_2-110271.i386.iso is the name of your ISO file
  • usr/lib/vmware/installer/VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_2-110271.i386.dd.bz2 is the name of the dd file in your iso (run tar ztf /mnt/esx/install.tgz to see what your exact file name is, it should be similar and relatively obvious)

It will take a few minutes to write, and when it's done simply boot off of this thumb drive. The PowerEdge servers have an internal USB (at least mine does) if aesthetics are important to you.

Source: http://cyborgworkshop.org/2008/08/30/install-vmware-esxi-onto-a-usb-thumbdrive/

EDIT 12/19/2009: ESXi 4.0.0 uses image.tgz instead of install.tgz to store it's dd file

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