Detect SATA drives ESXI

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SweetAction

New Member
Sep 14, 2011
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I have tried esxi 4.1 and 5.0 on my new build and i am hitting a bit of a brick wall. I am hoping that i do not have to buy any new hardware however i am starting to think i might.

this is my build:
CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1230 Sandy Bridge 3.2GHz LGA 1155 80W Quad-Core
Motherboard: TYAN S5512GM4NR ATX Server Motherboard LGA 1155 Intel C204
Chassis: Antec Three Hundred Illusion Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
Drives: (4x) Hitachi Deskstar 3.5 Inch 3 TB CoolSpin SATA 6Gb/s
RAM: 16 GB (4x4GB) Crucial 4GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) ECC Unbuffered Server Memory Model
Add-in Cards: HighPoint RocketRAID 640 4 SATA Port PCI-Express 2.0 x4 SATA 6Gb/s RAID Controller
Power Supply: OCZ ModXStream Pro 500W Modular High Performance Power Supply
Other Bits: HDD will be set in RAID 5

I was installing esxi from usb when i realized that it would not detect hdd's directly connected to the mother board and additionally did not detect any connected to the raid card. So i installed from usb TO a second usb thinking maybe i could get the drivers for the SATA drives to work post install. Low and behold that was a failed thought. So where i am now is trying to figure out how to get esxi to detect my sata drives EITHER through the raid controller or the mother boards integrated. I figure if i can at least host the machines locally i can pass the raid controller through to the hosts for storage?

Well any advice would be great! i am hoping i can get this set up and working with what i have, so if anyone knows how to get this mother board to work with esxi I would much appreciate the advice. If i dont have any "hack options" to get this to work and have to buy a new raid controller, advice on a good low cost option (that is compatible) would be awesome. I am completely broke right now so the cheapest solution being finding a way to use my current hardware would be preferred.
 
Last edited:

Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
12,511
5,792
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How do you have the chipset set up? Not as RAID mode? Play with that setting and I bet you can get this to work.