Hi,
I know, I know, it's not on the HCL and it's a white box build, however, I am all out of ideas at the moment. Any help would be greatly appreciate.
Hardware:
Mobo: Gigabyte GA-880GMA-USB3 (Rev 3.1) BIOS upgraded to F3
CPU: AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer (8-core) - Not overclocked.
Disk: WD VelociRaptor 300GB SATA III - RAID1 using Mobo RAID controller.
NIC: Onboard & HP NC630T
So, I am installing from an SD card. Built using unetbootin for windows. ESX begins to install. The install starts going through the yellow framed screen. It gets to loading module usb-ohci. It then takes about two minutes before the purple diagnostics screen (PSOD). The PSOD's key words include:
0x418031200000
PCPU6: No heatbeat (but 1/1 IPIs received)
Heartbeat: 618: PCPU 2 didn't have a heartbeat for 297 seconds *may* be locked up.
Heartbeat: 618: PCPU 4 didn't have a heartbeat for 297 seconds *may* be locked up.
Heartbeat: 618: PCPU 6 didn't have a heartbeat for 297 seconds *may* be locked up.
The PCPU number changes on each attempt.
Whilst I've been waiting for Virgin Media to bring back my cable 
, I've changed over the keyboard from USB to PS2 and removed the mouse. If I keep pressing the spacebar, all the modules load. I get to the black 'n' white screen. Hit enter on install, but then get the PSOD again. I did read another post about pressing the spacebar, put I believe he'd got it installed.
I've spent the last four hours googling but have not been able to find anything helpful. I did find a post mentioning that the heartbeat might be caused by the CPU cores shutting down. I have disabled every type of power save feature I can find in the BIOS.
I am wondering if the system is hanging on the usb-ohci issue, the wait causes some cores to go to sleep thus causing the kernel panic.
If there are any switches or anyone has any ideas, I'd be most grateful if you could swing them in my direction.
Picture of BSOD attached.
Many thanks
W.
P.S. I installed Windows 2008 R2 to confirm everything with memory / CPU etc is ok.
I've also just upgraded to the latest BIOS. F4c (a beta version). Still no luck.