bank6 not a vmware boot bank no hypervisor found

[bmigette]

Hi All,

I have installed latest (as of today) ESX 5.1 on a 32 Gb SSD.

I have along with that a SSD Raid with a windows 7 OS. I just choose the disk from which I want to boot pressing F11 at startup, and it worked fine so far, but vmware ESX is creating a lot of FAT Partitions. I deleted the drive letter from windows disk management (and I didn't made anything else), as I wanted to get rid of the 3 drives that I don't (and shouldn't) want to use.

After I tried to boot on the vmware SSD, it shows me an error:

bank6 not a vmware boot bank

no hypervisor found

And I had to reinstall my system... I didn't had that much stuff yet on it, but still this is painful... I don't know why if I remove the FAT letter drive under windows it screws my VMWare installation...

I did this twice just to be sure.

Any idea why this is happening and what can I do ?

[jimm201110141]

I encountered this problem yesterday. Like the OP said, I can 100% reproduce it.

After some investigation, I think I've figured out the reason.

Trying with a VM, I compare the GPT partition table before and after Windows 7's "removing drive letter", and confirmed that Windows does change GPT partition table entry behind the scene, which fails ESXi's boot.

See my image below:

First, In order to "remove drive letter", Windows goes rude to change the partition entry in GPT(so harddisk LBA1, LBA2, ... all gets changed), with the highest bit in Attribute flags changed from 00 to 80 (the 0637h byte for example). This "change partition table" behavior does not exist in the era of MBR partition table.

Second, I see that ESXi 5.0 leaves an empty partition entry slot(for untold reason) , and Windows shifts the entries behind to fill the gap after GPT modification. So ESXi's boot bank BANK6 gets screwed. I think a VMware so-called BANK is a synonym for a partition entry.

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table#Partition_table_header_.28LBA_1.29

Then how to fix it? It is apparently not easy to do it by hand, (CRC32 calculation is not trivial), so there should be a tool to adjust GPT partition entry order. If someone knows such a tool, please reply or tell me  by chjfth<at>gmail.com .

[jimm201110141]

BTW, a VMware KB, VMware KB: ESXi 5.x host fails to reboot after installation with the error: Not a VMware boot bank. ... seems to talk about this issue, but it is more like talking nonsense.

[meimeiriver]

Great explanation!

Does anyone have a solution, though?! (Seriously, seems no one around here ever answers a question, LOL) I tried every image burning tool under the sun, but I keep getting the 'bank6 not a vmware boot bank no hypervisor found' error. Even the alleged 'Clonezilla inside a VM' trick doesn't work.

[Sundararajan]

Changing the boot type from legacy BIOS to UEFI after you install ESXi might cause the host to

fail to boot. In this case, the host displays an error message similar to Not a VMware boot bank. Changing the

host boot type between legacy BIOS and UEFI is not supported after you install ESXi.

[GregMca]

I realize this is a rather old post but figured I would give my solution.

Had the same problem, couldn't boot after writing a good image.

The simple solution?  Don't use Windows to write the image.

I managed to write an image with two different systems.

First is using a Mac and dd.

The second is to use the VMware system itself and a linux VM inside.

Pass the new thumb drive through to the linux VM, it shows up as a new drive (sdb in my case)

---

[  163.280435] scsi 33:0:0:0: Direct-Access     Kingston DataTraveler 3.0 1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6

[  163.281144] sd 33:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0

[  163.286006] sd 33:0:0:0: [sdb] 30218842 512-byte logical blocks: (15.4 GB/14.4 GiB)

---

Then just dd again.

dd if=boot-image.img of=/dev/sdb bs=1M

That was it, then disconnect the thumb drive and boot the VMware system from it.

Hope this helps..

[R-I-P]

This is old I know, but I'm rescuing some ESXi 6.5 hosts and needed to image the SD card using Windows.  Win32disk imager works perfectly as long as you first clean the USB thumb drive/SD card with diskpart, then write the image.