ESXi vs Skulltrail

I have an aging computer that I wished to turn into an ESXi server. It made a great workstation, and for many years remained my main computer, only recently giving way to a couple of laptops based on i7 cpus.

The motherboard is a D5400XS, equipped similar to how it ran the past 4 or 5 years as a workstation. That is, it has 16GB FB ram, with a nvidia GPU and a VMware supported NIC (intel pe).

My problem is that I am getting a strangle freeze when attempting to boot a ESXi install USB flash drive. Shortly after the kernel and modules get loaded, I just get a full black screen, with no errors to be seen.

I have already tried swapping out the video card with first an ATI then an older PCI based variant, as well as toggling boot and USB based BIOS settings. No matter what I do I get a similar black window, and haven't had any luck tracking this issue down online.

Does anyone have a guess what could be wrong and/or how to fix it? Switching to and from UEFI didn't work, but beyond that I am really just guessing and have no idea how to tell why it died.

Simplify. Turn off ~everything~ integrated with the board except the nic (if onboard) - all storage adapters, all AHCI, all raid - everything. Then try booting. A lot of that stuff confuses ESXi, as it was never intended for systems with it.

What version of Esxi are you trying to install?

I still haven't made any headway with this. I am in the exact same situation, and haven't been able to get esxi 5.5 u2 to install because it halts at the black screen.

My situation is:
1. Intel PE nic (supported) - have tried others
2. Nvideo GPU (both supported and unsupported variety tried, as well as a plain old PCI video card)
3. 16GB buffered RAM (worked fine with windows which it ran prior to this).

I've tried a lot of things, but have had multiple problems. For the moment, I can't seem to get USB bootinig to work (Altough i know i did have it at one point). I'm not sure if i picked the wrong BIOS options or the wrong build (rufus) options, but it seem very temperamental even tripping USB booting - does anyone know what it's prefered configuration is? (UEFI or not, USB fix disk, auto, etc).

I can use a CF to PATA converter to get it to boot, but it still has the same black screen issue during install. I am currrently exploring older version ESX 4.1 and/or disabling/configuring bios options. My motherboard takes damn long to post, so testing all the options takes constant attention and many reboots (hours).

I really want ESXi on here, and then i'm really hoping I can get pci passthrough to work, i'm hoping to implement vSGA and/or some fancy VMDirectPath configuration.

I feel like an idiot for responding to my own post, but I lost track of it and found it through a new google search when generically looking for solutions again. :-P

You are trying to install from the usb stick? Have you tried a CDROM, (if you have one)

Can you try using another computer to do the installation to the hard drive and then move it to the system you want to use as a server?

This will tell you if you having problems running Esxi on the system or just the installation process.

You can also install to Esxi to a flash drive in another hypervisor, but it be somewhat complicated.

try esxi6?

Did you try to install it from a CD instead, i had issues with crappy USB keys freezing on ESXi installs...

also can you test your ESXi ISO in virtaulbox or something make sure your image is good?