Creating Boot Disks the easy way

By | January 2, 2016

I recently blew away all my low power vm lab running XenServer 6.5 ( http://www.hardstaff.com/lower-power-vm-lab-pt-ii/ and http://www.hardstaff.com/lower-power-vm-lab/ ) and installed Vmware ESXi 6.0. Why I am not exactly sure but I just got bored with XenServer. Not that it’s doesn’t work or anything, in fact in my environment it did probably mostly everything I wanted. However I usually do this once a year, ie just blow it all away and start again 🙂

For more info on that see here http://www.hardstaff.com/esxi-6-0-on-low-end-hardware-part-one/

So I had a bunch of servers to reinstall and didn’t want to have to use CD’s (I didn’t have any blanks) and I had found this software last week while looking for ways to make a bootable Ubuntu USB key. Universal USB Installer

Now at first glance this does not look like it will ESXi etc however I gave it a shot and it  works perfectly. So what you do is this. Download the software is a good start, no need to install, it runs from where you saved it, then follow screenshots.

 

usb install 1

From the drop down menu select the last option

Clipboard Image (1)

The select your ESXi 6.0 ISO

usb install 3

Then select your USB drive.

Clipboard Image (3)

Now each time I id this I selected the format option and it always worked. I also found that selecting Windows 8 the using the Windows Server 12 ISO works fine also.

usb install 4

esxi-boot

ESXi 6.0 booting on my Intel NUC (see linked article)

Phill

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