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Back up anything you want to save, as these steps will make permanent changes.

1. Boot, if you see a RAID configuration screen, hit Ctrl-I to enter setup and remove all drives from the RAID array.
2. Reboot, enter BIOS setup and make sure your drive configuration is set to “RAID ATA.”
3. While you’re in the BIOS setup, enable virtualization in the CPU settings. This will let you create 64-bit virtual guests.
4. Follow these steps to install VMWare ESXi

Here are a couple things I learned about converting VMWare images this weekend. First off, if you get an error that says “failed to obtain lock,” go find .lck directories in your image. Rename them or move them out of the folder.

Also, if you get an error “failed to open file,” make sure the VMWare image is local to the computer where you are running the converter. My source image was on a USB drive. Once I copied it locally, it worked. Part of the problem might be I’m running the conversion tool in a VMWare instance on my MacBook Pro.

After I removed the .lck directories and copied the image to my VMWare guest on the MacBook, it worked fine. I was able to convert the image and send it over the VPN to my ESXi server.