VMWare ESX 3.5 install hangs cannot mount cdrom?? [SOLVED]

[Guest]

[GuyH]

Trying to install EFW2.4 on an ESX3.5 server

boots from cd image ok, then blue screen and no further

Alt-F2 shows that it is cycling with the install failing at /bin/mountsource.sh

looking at that it uses kudzu to detect the cdrom

running kudzu manually it doesn't find the drive!! (at least I have found the problem!!)

It does detect the IDE adapter as an
"Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 IDE"
using the ata_piix driver

but there are no cdrom(s) visible

Any help? ideas?

(looking in mountsource, there seems to be an option to install from a network image - anyone know how to do that?)

[GuyH]

Interesting solution - I'll copy it here in case anyone ever has the same problem

I found no way to get kudzu to detect the cdrom drive, tried lots of different configs in the VM BIOS primary IDE, secondary IDE and ... nothing

I did notice that in /bin/mountsource.sh it looked at HD devices.

I created a small harddrive in VMWare, connected it to a debian VM.
In there, I mounted the EFW.ISO image and the new drive and copied the contents of the CD onto the drive.

Then mounted the drive as a 2nd scsi drive onto the efw VM

booted and STILL the installer hung !!!!

Looking in mountsource.bin again it looks for the source and then, wherever it finds it it mounts it on /cdrom
so I Alt-F3 into the shell and mounted /dev/sdb1 by hand onto /cdrom

and YAY! it worked

It was a struggle but I now have an excellent efw firewall replacement for my Smoothwall and, so far very pleased

[g.vecchi]

Thank you very much, really useful!!