I’ve tried it with the HP ISO and the VMware ISO, and I either get a message about ‘no image to install’ if removing the reference to the image.bz2 file in the PXE config, or I get a purple screen of death post-PXE about the installation image being corrupted.

I’ve also tried extracting the .dd file from the VMware ISO and uploading that to the PXE server, but that gives a PSOD as well……

Any thoughts on correct format or file type for the installation source, and how to reference it in the PXE config? I’ll continue picking through options in the meantime…….

Cheers.
Jeremy.

You say you added an HP ISO, have you tried it without this? Not sure if it would make any difference, but I don’t know for sure if adding this would cause any problems.

Great post, but am having some issues with this…….

Like you, I’m using HP provided version of ESXi 4.1 installable, which has 2 noticable omissions in their ISO from your ABC above – namely:

- INSTALL.TAR is now INSTALL.VGZ
- There is no IMAGE.TGZ

I have managed to convert the install file by doing the following:
- Copy the install.vgz to an ESXi 4.1 host
- Convert it using ‘vmtar -x install.vgz -o install.tar
- Copy that back to the PXEServer VM

What happens now is that the PXEServer menu shows-up (including the edits I’ve made – menu changes, background etc), then running the installer having populated the ESXi_4x with the contents of the HP ISO plus the new INSTALL.TAR file is:
- The kernel module loads, as does the SYS and CIM module, but then it flashes a message that dissapears to quickly and returns to the boot menu.

Am a bit stuck now – any thoughts?
Many thanks.
Jeremy. :0)

Simon

Simon