So yesterday I was asked to setup a few x64 workstations on our ESX server. The Vista x64 machines detected the LSI controller no problem, but the Windows XP machines couldn’t find the controller, and the drivers that VMware included with ESX (3.0.2) were x86 only drivers.
After a few hours of digging around several forums and the LSI website I finely found the drivers. I downloaded them, and put them on a virtual floppy on the ESX server and mounted it to the XP x64 machine. It found the disk and the Windows installer ran through as normal.
So to make other peoples life easier I’ve zipped up the virtual floppy disk and posted it. Download the file and unzip it. Use PSFTP (from the putty installer) to upload the file to the ESX host. (If you don’t have a separate account to connect with that has root access you’ll need to connect as root which requires editing the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file and setting the PermitRootLogin setting to yes then restarting sshd using “/etc/init.d/ssh restart”. (You can read up more about allowing root to connect to ssh on this site.)
After you have connected as root and upload the flp file to /vmimages/floppies/floppies. Then use the VI client to mount the floppy to the guest OS.
Hopefully others will find this information useful.
Denny