When trying to install HP ESXi 5.5 customized image on a HP Gen 9 BL460 blade server I was not able to see the SD card to install on. After trying a few things I found that switching the USB 3.0 mode to Auto instead of the defaulted On allowed ESXi installation to see the SD card. The internal card reader goes over the USB bus so this appears to be a bug and hopefully HP will have a update soon to fix it. Below is what I did to get through this issue:
ESXi 5.5U2 Installation – If your not seeing the SD card, go ahead and reboot:
Hit F9 on the boot screen to enter System Utilities:
Hit Enter on the System Configuration:
Hit Enter on the BIOS/Platform Configuration:
Hit Enter on System Options:
Hit Enter on USB Options:
On USB 3.0 Mode, change the default value of Enabled to Auto. Now hit F10 to save and reboot.
Now on ESXi installer screen you should see the SD card:
Thanks for this!! We spent hours trying to get a G9 SD card detected and this fixed it for us. I doubt we would have looked at this setting had we not seen it. HP need to fix this!
Thank you for posting this. Fixed it for me.
Thanks for sharing, end of the month the new SPP comes, hopely its fixed then!
Hi Daniel,
this post saved my day! However, in my case Auto didn’t work, I had to set it to Disabled to make it works! Nevertheless thanks!!!
Thank you so much. This fix the issues I was having.
Hi,
HP also provides Insight control server provisioning (ICSP) appliance for the auto/scripted installation of different versions of ESX/Linux/Windows OS. This appliance also has the mechanism to auto detect either SD card or USB and perform installation on top of it.
I hope this information will help you in future.
For more information, google for the ICSP appliance. And this appliance is free to download.
Thanks for sharing, it helps me a lot!
A simple video to resolve the same issue.
https://youtu.be/hvAWjKMX_EM
Thank a lot 🙂
ROCK! I did a VMware Update Manager ESX update that got stuck. This bailed me out. Thank you kindly for sharing.
On an HP Dl360 G9 I had to disable USB 3. Setting it to Auto did not make the SD card available to the ESXI.
I used a SanDisk high speed 32 Gb micro SD card and it worked fine.
Thank You so much after one whole week of trying everything this has got me out of a bind.