We came across this article while doing an install for one of our clients and could not get ESXi server to install on a dell server that was 5 years old. Needless to say this really saved us some headaches and time and we got the installation to proceed smoothly after following these procedures.
By default, if the ESXi install can not find a supported device to install to, then the installer will quit with the error message: "Unable to find a supported device to write the VMware ESX Server 3i 3.5.0 image to." If it is the case that the IDE drive in your host is not recognized by ESXi, then you will be able to modify the install script TargetFilter.py to recognize your IDE device as a supported install device. You can find the list of devices that ESXi can recognize here.
