After installation of VMware ESX 3.5 on a SunFire X2100 the machine always faulted with a root-fs error.
Looking at the VMware forums, I found a post by rpartmann who provides a script to solve this issue[1].
With the help of his script I found the relevant steps to fix this issue for me:
- Boot into troubleshooting mode (there the SATA controller works).
- go to /etc/vmware/pciid
- edit sata_nv.xml
- As last entry before </vendor> I added:
<device id=”037f”>
<vmware label=”scsi”>
<driver>sata_nv</driver>
</vmware>
<name>MCP55 SATA Controller</name>
</device> - then I had to rebuild the PCI-ID Table:
esxcfg-pciid - regenerate the boot-filesystems:
esxcfg-boot -r - reboot
Then I could start without problem on my nVidia SATA chipset.
You might need to do the same procedure after an update of VMware. Haven’t been there so far.