Sadly -- my first attempt did not go well. I installed the new controller card (without any drives attached), and restarted the system. The system saw the controller card on boot, and gave the message about no drives found, and said to press any key to continue -- but no keyboard input was allowed. I shutdown, removed the card, and booted up again. This time around the system saw the old controller, but first started to boot to my unRAID USB stick. I shut down, removed the unRAID stick, and it started up again, but graphics came up on the wrong video card. ESXi started to boot this time, but would hang just after 'iodm loaded successfully'. I could connect to ESXi from the web interface even though the ESXi console still shows "loading" for the remaining drivers, but ESXi didn't see the passthrough controller, nor the video card that was previously set for passthrough!
Not sure where to go next. I'm tempted to start from scratch with the new controller card, and just rebuild everything... But that is always more work than I think it'll be...
Any ideas? Could this be as simple as the BIOS is confused?
Thanks!
John