Just about every evening, before we got the Southwind, I would work on Little-Blue. Somewhere between January and August, I got the thing to boot off a USB thumb-drive. This allowed me to load ESXi onto the thumb-drive (4gb although it only uses less than 1) and free up a 160gb disk.
Every now and then it would have problems rebooting but almost always after I made some change. I rationalized this in my mind with “aaaa, just got to break it in a bit. It’ll be fine”. And usually after a few reboots it would do ok. I’m sure you can guess how this turns out, eh?
Exactly. I upgrade my ESXi 4.x to ESXi 5.0 and struggle to get it to boot. I go so far as to even load Windows on one of the smaller disks (PATA) and even that has some trouble. It is not stable, it hangs, it freezes up, it refuses to boot. Break out the manual, go over all the BIOS settings. Check for updated BIOS. I’m up-to-date and all settings are fine. Change everything to default setting. No joy.
So now I turn to google and start researching. I begin to formulate a hypothesis (oooo, all those years of college science is finally paying off). The hypothesis is this:
I have a broken motherboard or bad memory or maybe both.
Didn’t say it was a good hypothesis, now did I?
Found some great diagnostics on the web, memtest86+. Fired that up and and let it run. Initially, it ran for several hours before is started showing errors. Shutdown, Let things cool down, contact G.Skill, send questions out on their forum (GREAT bunch of folks–I LIKE G.SKILL memory if for no other reason than because of their support team). Rinse and repeat. I spend DAYS doing this trying to rule out bad memory and/or bad BIOS settings.
Eventually it becomes evident that the problem is in the motherboard (Hey! You should have gotten a clue when you couldn’t boot off the USB drive). NOW, I got to go through the whole “Try this, try that, Are you sure your memory is good?” thing. I did finally convince them to let me RMA the board. One of the initial reasons for buying this brand was that they had a 3-year warranty. Come to find out however, that Asus has somewhat of a reputation for, shall we say, ignoring the warranty and claiming the problem was elsewhere. So I’m sweating bullets. I’m just sure they are going to get the board, tell me, “Oops, its on you” and I’m out a bunch of money AND my main system.
Two weeks go by and no email, no response to emails, nothing. Two weeks and one day, UPS knocks on the door, drops something on the ground and runs like it is an I.E.D. back to the truck. It’s my motherboard!
Cable everything up, fire it up and just for grins, try to boot from the USB. IT WORKS! And has been working ever since.