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churnd
Asked: 2011-06-19 18:10:37 +0800 CST

Disable ESXi passthrough on SATA controller

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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.

intel-vt-x vmware-esxi sata passthrough

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Why not just reinstall, which would reset the configuration.

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  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".

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  3. 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.

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