Installing XP virtual machine on ESXi 3.5

Well I have been running many different OS's on quite a few different ESX boxes, however, I never yet had installed Win XP on any of them. Well the other day I wanted to do some testing on XP and decided to do just that. Well it was not that easy. Suddenly I was faced with an error message: "setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer".

I did not get too worried as I found a solution quite fast, however, I did think to share this with rest of the folk.

While booting windows XP image press F6 in order to load drivers manually. You will also have to mount floppy image on that specific machine that will contain the drivers needed.

Here is a link to floppy image for you to download: http://www2.griswold.k12.ct.us/vmscsi-1204.flp

Problem with shutting down computer

My parents had a problem with shutting down their computer recently. After they would click on "shut down", system would freeze and "shut down" option box would take 3-4 minutes to come up. It was pretty annoying. I checked their computer and found following error message on every shutdown attempt:

"the server {9B1F122C-2982-4E91-AA8B-E071D54F2A4D} did not register with dcom within the required timeout."

I did some research myself and cam across an article with fix that was exactly what fixed this issue. What I did was run some regsrv32 commands on few dll's causing the issue. After this was done my problem was resolved. Below is the list of commands ran.

net stop wuauserv
regsvr32 /s wuapi.dll
regsvr32 /s wups.dll
regsvr32 /s wuaueng.dll
regsvr32 /s wuaueng1.dll
regsvr32 /s wucltui.dll
regsvr32 /s wuweb.dll
regsvr32 /s jscript.dll
regsvr32 /s atl.dll
regsvr32 /s softpub.dll
regsvr32 /s msxml3.dll
net start wuauserv

Helpful article was found @ http://www.windowsbbs.com/windows-xp/47229-problems-shutdown-reboot-logoff-dcom-automatic-updates.html