ESXi: Unable to create filesystem

aaronearles

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Aug 31, 2006
Messages
2,016
Just loaded up VMWare ESXi 4.0 on a whitebox for some testing, the box has an NVidia MCP55 SATA Controller, which I believe is supported. I disabled RAID in the bios, and have 4 independent disks, 3x 160GB and a 1TB. After installing ESXi, the three 160GB drives are available as datastores, the 1TB is under devices but when trying to add storage, I choose that drive, click next, and get an error message

"esxi unable to create filesystem, please see vmkernel log" (I would check the vmkernel log, but I didn't think that esxi had a shell or ssh access to get to it?)

after that error, any following attempts to add the drive result in,
"esxi unable to read partition information from this disk"

until I boot up a live cd and wipe out the partition. Then I'm back to the first error again.

Anyone experience anything similar to this?
 
Alt-F1 at the console
Type: unsupported
hit enter
(repeat if it doesn't work)
give it a root password
Boom - Shell. cat /var/log/vmkernel, see what the error is. :)

fwiw, the MCP is a piece of shit controller.
 
Got it figured out, the drive was setup with GPT, had to boot to live CD and create an MBR instead.

I know the box is all junk, but it's just for testing and study, nothing important will be stored here. It was all leftover stuff.

Thanks for the help.
 
lol, no worries - it's fine for that, just don't try a production machine on that :p
 
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