Reply to: VMWare ESXi - Can't boot fom CD

[Churchill]

What I did was this - downloaded the ISO then mounted it on a virtual CD drive & burned the contents to disk

Gimp!

That doesn't make the CD bootable!

FFS!

Read up on boot-sectors. Might just give you a technical grounding.

[wurzel]

Yep, that's it - it's working now. I used NTI CD burner which has an option to burn from ISO image. Contents of the disk look exactly the same as the dodgy one when I view it in window explorer though. Thanks for the help.

[voodooflux]

Just use IMGBURN...

WHS, great little utility. Although Windows 7 (and Vista I think?) has built-in support for burning ISO images - just right click on the ISO file and choose "Burn disc image".

[Ardesco]

Been pondering giving this one a go, but never got round to it as I have a paid up copy of Nero:

http://infrarecorder.org/

May be worth a pop

[pmeswani]

What I did was this - downloaded the ISO then mounted it on a virtual CD drive & burned the contents to disk

That would probably be a good reason for it not to boot. You need an ISO burning tool (commercial tools such as Nero would do. Freeware tools are available).

[dinker]

What I did was this - downloaded the ISO then mounted it on a virtual CD drive & burned the contents to disk

Just use IMGBURN like everybody else, if you burn the files contained in the ISO to a CD they won`t be in the right place for a bootable disk. Boot sectors have to be in a specific place.

Edit: You are making hard work of this!

[Incognito]

What I did was this - downloaded the ISO then mounted it on a virtual CD drive & burned the contents to disk

Humour me here for a moment, can you try burning the iso straight to disk instead of the method you've done.

Free iso burning tool if you don't have one.

[wurzel]

Nah, that's not how it works. The HCL is purely only to dictate what hardware VMware will support.

It should still boot to install.

Not teaching you to suck eggs wurzel, but you did burn the cd properly? If all you've done is 'copy' the iso image onto the cd then it won't boot. If you browse the cd, do you just see the one .iso file?

Try booting from USB

What I did was this - downloaded the ISO then mounted it on a virtual CD drive & burned the contents to disk

[Incognito]

"NOTE: VMware ESX 4.0 and ESXi 4.0 require 64-bit capable servers for installation and execution. "

You can still get 3.5 from the downloads section.

[dinker]

OK I filled in all the junk to create an account, downloaded the ISO and burnt it to CD using IMGBURN.

It works perfectly!

[dinker]

"NOTE: VMware ESX 4.0 and ESXi 4.0 require 64-bit capable servers for installation and execution. "

[Incognito]

Then the problem could well be that the CD can only be bootable on ESXi compatible hardware.

Nah, that's not how it works. The HCL is purely only to dictate what hardware VMware will support.

It should still boot to install.

Not teaching you to suck eggs wurzel, but you did burn the cd properly? If all you've done is 'copy' the iso image onto the cd then it won't boot. If you browse the cd, do you just see the one .iso file?

Try booting from USB

[pmeswani]

Yes, it's what I feared. Spent hours getting that server ready. Frustrating.
Thanks anyway.

An alternative solution? Put linux on the box and run VMWare Server on it and then install ESXi on top. But you may need to allocate a lot of memory to it.

[wurzel]

Then the problem could well be that the CD can only be bootable on ESXi compatible hardware.

Yes, it's what I feared. Spent hours getting that server ready. Frustrating.
Thanks anyway.

[pmeswani]

Yes and No. Tried it on my laptop but didnt boot.

Then the problem could well be that the CD can only be bootable on ESXi compatible hardware.