DUAL BOOT ESXI AND WINDOWS 10 INSTALL

On a system with lots of unformatted drives like mine, and where I was installing Windows to not the first volume, it chose to put the system reserved partition and the MBR for windows on the first volume set, ensuring that it would be booted automatically.

DUAL BOOT ESXI AND WINDOWS 10 INSTALL

Unfortunately while it will install your C: drive to the selected partition, it will install the 100MB System Reserved partition which it boots from to where it sees fit. While Microsoft is nice enough to ask you which drive you'd like to install Windows on, that doesn't mean it'll listen. Afterwards I ran this command to prevent Windows from auto-mounting these volumes: Unfortunately VMware also doesn't seem to provide a way to fix a corrupted Boot Bank, so I was forced to reinstall. VMware provides very little information on this error ( and not applicable to my situation). Anywho, for quite a long time I was stuck with the error 'Not a VMware Boot Bank'. I assumed it was because Microsoft was automounting the VMware Boot Banks (they are formatted fat32). Not sure how I accomplished this on the first server, because I couldn't replicate it on the second. That way, incase you're like me and already started this project before doing your research, you can plan a bit before reading the whole article. Instead of telling this story as it happened, I'm going to first go over the hiccups I encountered on the way. For a brief moment I flirted with the idea of cutting up the disk using partitions, until a closer look at ESXi and Xen's installation revealed they don't provide any granularity in setup of the partition tables beyond selecting an installation volume. Unfortunately the raid controller for servers I was using (I'm going to refrain from plugging any one vendor, at least as long as I'm operating on other people's hardware) doesn't provide this functionality. My initial plan was to divide my six harddrives into 4 logical volumes at the raid controller level.

I could have accomplished this project via constantly swapping harddrives when I needed to change hypervisors, but that seemed more like accepting the problem than a solution. You setup Windows 2000 and Redhat to dual boot 11 years ago, how much can things have changed? Congratulations, you decided to be the ultimate hypervisor egalitarian and install every mainstream hypervisor + KVM onto a single server.

Dual boot esxi and windows 10