Installing Windows XP on VMware ESX/ESXi – No Hard Disk Drive Found

Rob — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 12:36:51 +0000

It might seem a little odd to some, attempting to install Microsoft Windows XP into a Virtual Machine running on VMware’s ESX 3.5. That’s more of a job for VMware Workstation or Player. However, I wanted to install a Windows XP VM in my ESX test environment, to try some things out. I was a little surprised when I was greeted with this message during the initial install though:

I’ve installed countless Windows Server 2003 VMs, and not had any issues. Pre-morning-coffee, it wasn’t immediately obvious why Windows XP would have any issues installing, especially as its listed as a supported VM type during the virtual hardware configuration steps.I found some very helpful instructions here: http://vantoft.org/2009/01/05/esx-esxi-windows-xp-guest-install-reports-no-hard-disk-found/

Essentially, VMware ESX gives you a choice of Buslogic or LSI Logic SCSI adapters for Windows XP VMs. The Windows XP CD installer doesn’t have built-in support for these adapters, and therefore cannot see the VMs hard drive(s). As such, you need to download a floppy disk image containing the necessary SCSI adapter driver. Thankfully, VMware provides this floppy disk image for download. Follow the 6 steps in the above link to proceed with the Windows XP installation.

Upgrading MySQL 5.0 to 5.1 on Debian 5.0

Rob — Sat, 16 May 2009 16:00:16 +0000

I have a small low-power x86 machine at home running Debian 5.0. I regularly check for updates to any of the packages I have installed on it, and for a while its been offering an upgrade to MySQL. I dont use MySQL much at home, so I havent been too bothered about keeping that up to date. However, I got fed up of it nagging me, so I decided to proceed with the update. The following is what happened:

Preparing to replace mysql-server 5.0.51a-24 (using .../mysql-server_5.1.34-0.dotdeb.1_all.deb) ...
 Unpacking replacement mysql-server ...
 (Reading database ... 120744 files and directories currently installed.)
 Removing mysql-server-5.0 ...
 Stopping MySQL database server: mysqld.
 Removing mysql-client-5.0 ...
 Processing triggers for man-db ...
 Selecting previously deselected package mysql-client-5.1.
 (Reading database ... 118764 files and directories currently installed.)
 Unpacking mysql-client-5.1 (from .../mysql-client-5.1_5.1.34-0.dotdeb.1_i386.deb) ...
 Selecting previously deselected package mysql-server-5.1.
 Unpacking mysql-server-5.1 (from .../mysql-server-5.1_5.1.34-0.dotdeb.1_i386.deb) ...
 Processing triggers for man-db ...
 Processing triggers for menu ...
 Setting up mysql-client-5.1 (5.1.34-0.dotdeb.1) ...
 Setting up mysql-server-5.1 (5.1.34-0.dotdeb.1) ...
 Installing new version of config file /etc/init.d/mysql ...
 Stopping MySQL database server: mysqld.
 Starting MySQL database server: mysqld . . . . . . . . . . . . . . failed!

 invoke-rc.d: initscript mysql, action "start" failed.
 dpkg: error processing mysql-server-5.1 (--configure):
 subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of mysql-server:
 mysql-server depends on mysql-server-5.1; however:
 Package mysql-server-5.1 is not configured yet.
 dpkg: error processing mysql-server (--configure):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
 Processing triggers for menu ...
 Errors were encountered while processing:
 mysql-server-5.1
 mysql-server

Aaargh! My good MySQL install has been blown away, and the update has failed to install properly!

The error messages were less than helpful, and as far as I could see, I had all the prerequisite packages installed. What to do?

After a bit of googling, I came across someone with the same problem at this forum thread.

They suggested that MySQL 5.1 cannot have ‘skip-bdb’ in the my.cnf configuration file. As my Debian machine is a low memory box, I had ‘skip-bdb’ set for MySQL 5.0 in order to save some memory. After commenting ‘skip-bdb’ out of the my.cnf file (placing # in front of it), I tried an ‘apt-get -f install’, and the installation completed successfully.

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Installing Windows XP on VMware ESX/ESXi – No Hard Disk Drive Found

Upgrading MySQL 5.0 to 5.1 on Debian 5.0