Unable to boot ESXi from SATA disk in Legacy BIOS mode when the SATA controller is in RAID mode
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Article ID: 345595
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Updated On:
Products
VMware vSphere ESXi
Issue/Introduction
Symptoms: You are unable to boot ESXi from SATA disk in Legacy BIOS mode, when the SATA controller is in RAID mode.
Environment
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.0
Cause
This issue occurs in one of the below scenarios:
BIOS does not support booting from SATA RAID mode.
SATA controller has been configured to RAID mode and maybe a logical volume has been created on multi-disks. However, from the perspectives of ESX and vmw_ahci, the SATA controller is only recognized as AHCI mode, and logical volume is not detected. The installer of ESX only write booting information on one disk. If BIOS support booting from SATA RAID mode, BIOS tries to read booting information from multi-disks.
Resolution
This is a known issue affecting VMware ESXi 6.0 U3.
Workaround: To work around this issue, use either of these options: