Failed ESXi 6U2 upgrade - suggestions please

[JohnOCFII]

Greetings,

I'm new here.

Two years ago I built a home-server for ESXi based on an AMD 8 core processor and ASRocks motherboard. It's been working great until my power supply failed a week ago. Unfortunately, that power supply failed as I was trying to do an ESXi patch upgrade from the ESXi shell.

I replaced the power supply. ESXi boots from a USB memory stick. I think the power supply failure damaged a file that was being written. Now it won't boot. The option to use the alternate boot bank shows no backup copy.

I had a backup. It seems to be missing.

I did make an image backup of the current failing USB stick.

So -- I tried to do an install/upgrade using a new ISO Installer from VMware. It does not find a version of ESXi to upgrade!

I'm at the point where maybe I should just accept the new installation, but I think I'll need to add back in some VIB files that are not part of 6.0 I did a test install on a separate USB card, and as expected one of the two Ethernet adapters did not show up. Even more concerning, using the new Web UI, none of my hardware showed as pass-through eligible, which would be a big problem.

Along the way, I've had issues with my -dd- image copies not booting. (some do, some don't).

Anyway. I'm been poking at this quite a bit over the last week, but am getting frustrated. I'd appreciate any advice. In the past I've used the guides from Andreas Peetz at VMware Front Experience: vSphere 6 is GA: The ultimate guide to upgrade your white box to ESXi 6.0

I didn't see a forum area there, so here I am.

Thanks,

John

 

[dswartz]

Unless you have a very esoteric configuration, just reinstall from scratch. That's the advice I've seen from guys like lopoetve over on hardforum (he worked a vmware, so...)

 

[JohnOCFII]

Good News!

I got the upgrade to take! I found someone else on the Internet who solved the issue by copying all the files in BOOTBANK to ALTBOOTBANK. I loaded my boot USB in a different Linux machine and copied over all the files. That was enough for the upgrade to work correctly. The main reason I wanted to do the upgrade instead of a fresh installation was to avoid having to figure out how to re-load drivers for network interfaces that VMware used to support, but no doesn't.

Bad News!

It is telling me the hardware doesn't support passthrough. It did last week. I wonder if something changed in the BIOS when it was powered off, and unplugged for a week. I -did- have to re-set up boot order and things like that. I guess I need to go check. I'd have to think that moving from 6.0.0 from November/December to the March update did something to blacklist passthrough.

One step forward...

 

[cheezehead]

When building up your home system for handling custom drivers or special VT-d configs, I've printed out instructions along with having a two burned disks one for ESXi and one for the custom drivers just in case.

Also worth mentioning you can backup the config, in the future you have issues (https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/m...nguage=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2042141).

If you BIOS reset to factory defaults, you'll need to re-enable VT-d in the BIOS.

 

[JohnOCFII]

Yep - that was it. The BIOS default is IOMMU (for VT-d support) disabled. I needed it enabled. Phew! That is now working.

"I will always have multiple backups" "I will always have multiple backups" "I will always have multiple backups"
"I will always have multiple backups" "I will always have multiple backups" "I will always have multiple backups"
"I will always have multiple backups" "I will always have multiple backups" "I will always have multiple backups"
"I will always have multiple backups" "I will always have multiple backups" "I will always have multiple backups"
"I will always have multiple backups" "I will always have multiple backups" "I will always have multiple backups"