Boot Failure after installing VMware ESXi 4.1 onto SD Card

Question

Hi, I have a brand new R810 and I am trying to get VMware vSphere ESXi 4.1 onto the built in SD cards. The installer finishes completely and I reboot the system and after the lengthy reboot I get a "No PXE-capable device available. Strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for system setup."

The SD cards are working just fine and the boot sequence has the Hard drive C: (Internal SD Card: Internal Dual SD) selected as the first boot device. This system has no local hard drives, it is just to boot off of the SD cards. This is not my first R810 system, but my first to exhibit this problem. All my other R810's boot off of the Dual SD cards with no issues.

I disabled the PXE from the embedded NIC's. The system also has two other 4 port ethernet cards in it. It has a Intel Gigabit ET NIC, Quad Port (430-0657) and a Broadcom NetXtreme II 5709 Gigabit Quad Port NIC. I don't see any way of disabling PXE capabilities with these nics during the system startup, so I am not sure if these nics are causing the problem or not.

Anyone have any issues on how to get this bugger booting properly? If not, I guess I will have to engage Dell ProSupport this week to get it working. I have never seen this problem before on all my Dell servers.

Thanks,

Sean

Dev Mgr · Answer

The PXE boot is just the result of nothing else booting.

I'd check these settings (which you probably already did though):

- is the SD card enabled in the bios (integrated devices) -> some OSes can see storage devices even if the bios has them enabled (ran into this this weekend on my laptop)

- is the boot order set to boot to 'harddrive' first

- is the harddrive order listing only the SD card

sdonaghey · Answer

Thanks for the reply.  Yes to all those questions.  One note, when I press F1 to retry the boot, it boots into VMware from the SD card.  I am not sure why it wants to PXE boot the server.

DELL-Rey G · Answer

if you press F11 for the boot manager, what does the listing say?

bhurl4 · Answer

I am having the exact same issue with a dell r810. Did you ever find a resolution?

jrambo81 · Answer

I have this issue no resolution?

PowerEdge Hardware General

Boot Failure after installing VMware ESXi 4.1 onto SD Card

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