sco

I read your post yesterday I think. But I missed that 0.0 detail it did not seem so important. It is, apparently, most important. The other disks, though, don't need to be SATA. They can also be SCSI.

Nice one.... this should be stickied somewhere, at least in some ESXi section What I did earlier, when trying to fix something to make this work, was that I removed the CD/DVD drive, which was sitting on SATA 0.0, so next when I re-added the loader as a VMDK, it landed on SATA 0.0. What I did after that had no consequence it seems. So the trick is to always have the loader VMDK on SATA 0.0, if you do not run this via USB stick (which in my env is not possible I think - I even tried to pass the IMG file via iLO as a USB stick to the VM, no luck, it didn't even boot).

I tried to recreate the VM, no luck, it fails again with the same setup. Previously though, I managed to login via serial and played around with some scripts, but I doubt that did anything good... will keep trying and update if I manage to reproduce the working scenario.

HP Microserver Gen8, ESXi 6.7 here. I already have DSM 6.1 latest installed in a VM, working just fine. Did not have the guts to migrate it to 6.2 so I decided to first install 6.2 fresh in a new VM. I have been struggling with it for the past 4 days, to no avail, installed kept failing with "corrupt file, error 13" or whatever it was. I even enabled serial via telnet to see what was happening and found out that there was no available partition to install to... or at least this is what it seemed like. So, this is how I made it work: 1. Jun's 1.03b IMG file (with modified grub.conf for serial number and network MAC - this was not even necessary, I could have changed the MAC in VM before starting it, but still...) set up as VMDK running on SATA 0.0, made sure in BIOS that this is the first boot option. 2. A new VMDK created on the SCSI controller (if there is no SCSI disk the DSM installer complains that there is no disk to install to). 3. A third disk, VMDK created on the SATA controller, 0.1. This is used by the DSM installer somehow, I have no idea why and how. Disk at point 2 above is actually used to create md0 and md1 for installing DSM on, for storage pool as well... very odd. I hope this helps others. Meanwhile I will do some more experiments.

Use Starwind to convert from IMG to VMDK (export as VMWare ESX Server image). It will create two files, one VMDK and one VMDK flat. Upload the two VMDK files to the datastore. Create a new VM in ESXi, add a new, existing HDD, point to the VMDK without flat in the name, finish setup, start the VM, let it boot until you see "Booting the kernel" message, then go to Synology Assistant and install on the freshly created DSM (it may take a few minutes until it appears in the list). Over.

Use Starwind to convert from IMG to VMDK. It will create two files, one VMDK and one VMDK flat. Upload the two VMDK files to the datastore. Create a new VM in ESXi, add a new, existing HDD, point to the VMDK without flat in the name, finish setup, start the VM, let it boot until you see "Booting the kernel" message, then go to Synology Assistant and install on the freshly created DSM (it may take a few minutes until it appears in the list). Over.