Disable ESXi passthrough on SATA controller

Question

I have a newly built ESXi server with two SSD's hooked up to the motherboard primary SATA controller. Everything was working until I made the mistake of enabling passthrough on that SATA controller. Now, ESXi will reboot & come up complaining it doesn't have any data stores configured:

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Each time I'll go in & uncheck passthrough for that controller & reboot again, but it keeps coming back up enabled. Not sure what to do from here?

I tried temporarily disabling VT-d in BIOS, but that didn't help. Passthrough showed disabled in ESXi, but I still got the persistent storage error.

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 19 '11 at 04:51

5

Why not just reinstall, which would reset the configuration.

answered Jun 19 '11 at 04:51

Jim B

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Probably what I'll have to do. – churnd Jun 19 '11 at 13:13
I re-installed. – churnd Mar 02 '12 at 11:16

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 19 '11 at 02:16

2

Assuming you don't expect any data to still exist on the SSD drives, disable VT-D, reboot and create a new datastore in the storage tab on the SSD's. That would become your "persistent storage".

answered Jun 19 '11 at 02:16

ewwhite

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One of the SSD's is the ESXi boot disk. – churnd Jun 19 '11 at 03:51

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 17 '17 at 08:25

I have a similar problem where I have three M.2 PCIE SSD's and enabled the wrong two for Passthrough (PCIE numbering seems to be opposite from what I thought it would be. It loses al changes after reboot, so you can't undo this anymore. Will try to boot ESXi from a USB stick, so I safely can move my VM's on that datastore to a NAS. Then I can probably reinstall ESXi and enable the right SSD's for Passthrough.

Disable ESXi passthrough on SATA controller

3 Answers3