How to create a bootable USB Stick with ESXi Hypervisor on it
Prerequisits
Steps
Plug in the USB Stick and locate the drive letter
assigned to it. In some cases, you have to reboot your PC to recognize the USB
device correctly.
Format the Stick using the standard windows format (right click on the drive
letter and choose "Format"
Tho following settings are working best for me.
Write bootsector information on the USB Stick
You need the bootsector information from a bootable media (Floppy or Harddisk). To get this info, you use the mkbt.exe utility.
Put the mkbt.exe file into a separate directory.
Open a command window pointing to this directory.
Type the following command, to get the bootsector info from your local bootdisk (in my case it is "c:"
mkbt -x -c c: mybootsector.bin
Type the following command to write the bootsector inf onto the USB Stick (in my case located as drive d:)
mkbt mybootsector.bin d:
The USB Stick is now ready to receive a diskimage.
Extract the diskimage from the ESXi ISO
The final goal is to get the file VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_2-110271.i386.dd
Locate the downloaded ISO file, right click on it and choose "Extract Files..." using Winrar
If you like, choose a new directory and click "OK"
Locate the file "INSTALL.TGZ", right click on it and choose "Extract to INSTALL\"
Locate the file VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_2-110271.i386.bz2, right click and choose "Extract here"
you have it !
You can delete everything except the file "VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_2-110271.i386.dd"
Write the diskimage onto the USB Stick using Winimage
Open Winimage, click on "Disk" and choose "Restore Virtual Hard ....."
Choose the correct disk to restore the image onto
Point Winimage to the ESXi diskimage
Check if everything is correct, then click "OK"
To have your hardware booting from the USB Stick, you have to set the boot options in the BIOS of course.
