Hi all!
I have a bit of a problem with a USB-booted ESX 4 installation.
What happens is basically that the server state (configuration, inventory, licenses et.c) is not saved between reboots.
Someone told me that the configuration should be save once every hour and since that simple does not happen on this machine I checked the crontab and found that the first minute every hour /sbin/auto-backup.sh is executed.
I have tried running it manually a bunch of times but nothing seems to be happening at all in the /bootbank directory and there is definitely no state.tgz
When I run it manually it returns only this:
~ # /sbin/auto-backup.sh
boot type: visor-usb
~ #
Which is exactly what esxcfg-info -e is returning. But that's all. Same goes for running /sbin/backup.sh 0 too but I don't know if that would be correct. I looks like using 0 as an argument would make it use the USB-wrappers, but I'm not really a shell-scripter. 
One think that pops into my mind would be that there's something wrong with the USB-drive, but I don't see how I could have been able to upgrade from 4.0 to 4.1 then if it's read-only. I don't know... I just getting frustrated and tempted to basically reinstall the server, which brings me to another question.
My setup is the hypervisor on a USB-stick and three SATA-disks for the VMFS3 drives. What would happen to these VMFS3 drives if I opted to skip the USB-key and install VMware ESXi 4.1 onto one of the SATA drives? Will it be wiped and reformatted or will my virtual machines remain untouched?
Hoping for an answer! 
