So I have a new ASrock 1155ITX mobo and a G550T, am planning on virtualizing pfsense and untangle on it.  Has one PCIe x16 slot and an onboard Realtek garbage NIC.  I have an Intel quad gig-e NIC, PCIe x4.

 

I installed ESXi 6.0 on a thumb drive on an Atom with dual Intel NICs while I waited for other hardware to arrive.  Once I built up the ASrock, I used that thumbdrive, and booted ESXi.  Life was good, four gig-e ports detected.  But I wanted to use the Realtek for management.  So I re-installed ESXi using the customizer to get Realtek support.

 

ESXi booted and detected the Realtek, however could not find the Intel quad gig-e.  Over on the ESXi forum someone had me run some commands which interrogated the PCI bus, and the output indicates that the PCI card is not being detected by the system at all.  But the CPUs on the quad card get warm, and all four ports give me link lights, so I know its at least getting power.

 

Tried booting with pfsense live CD, did not detect the Intel card.

 

Moved the Intel card to another machine, ESXi and pfsense live CD detect it perfectly.

 

Moved it back to the ASrock, and nothing I do can make it work (tried different versions of ESXi, with and without Realtek drivers, stock images, etc). 

 

I reset the ASrock BIOS to factory defaults, no luck.  I changed the only setting I could find related to the PCIe slot -- onboard graphics or PCIe graphics -- changed these settings around and tried booting ESXi and pfsense Live CD with each change made -- Intel quad card is not detected no matter what I do in BIOS.

 

It driving me nuts because it literally worked -- once -- the first time.  And the card works in another system so I know its good.

 

A quad-port SATA controller works just fine in the ASrock, so I know the PCIe slot works (thought maybe I killed it somehow).  Only difference is, the SATA controller is PCIe x1, and the quad NIC is PCIe x4 -- could this make a difference?  Could I have somehow jacked up the leads further down the PCIe slot, allowing an x1 card to work and an x4 card to not work?  Visual inspection shows the slot is in good shape, near as I can tell. 

 

Like I said, brand new board, all brand new hardware, tried three different power supplies, tried two different pair of RAM... I'm at my wits end and have no idea how to further troubleshoot this.  Half tempted just to buy a new motherboard and start over.

 

Suggestions welcome.

Try this:

1. Pull out the Intel NIC

2. Reset your BIOS

3. Disable the Realtek on-board

4. Reinstall the Intel NIC

5. Do a fresh install of ESXi without the Realtek driver.

6. See if the Intel card works now

 

If the Intel card works after all that, you just have to not use the Realtek on-board.  If the Intel card still doesn't work, maybe something was damaged in handling or something (debris in the PCIe slot?). 

 

The all-knowing Google has a few cases of conflicts between on-board Realtek and Intel NICs, but it's usually at the driver-level, and there aren't enough recent cases to definitively say whether there is a real issue there or not.

Bent pin on PCIe slot (inside).  15 years ago I would have spotted it right away.  Today my eyes needed a huge magnifying glass and a lot of light.  FML.

 

Thanks.  RMA time.