Ah, but VMWare server and ESXi are both thin virtualization layers. They're not the same as the "desktop" version, or "workstation" or whatever the heck. And they require kernel shims. Without getting ideological, KVM is a very nice alternative. I use it exclusively now in place of VMWare - though I'll be honest, it's not quite as good at emulating platform bugs as VMWare.

The ethernet upgrade option is lovely, once you have working ethernet on the device. But if you've got a brand new disk, you've essentially got to go for the Windows option. But now Mark has posted his instructions, what I can do is:

*). Make sure this 250GB disk works ok this time.
*). Find some time to recycle the old 10GB disk.
*). Write a shell script to add to the manual "partition" and "format" instructions someone else wrote up. Then you can load the ramdisk and kernel into flash with download and run a shell script and not need the Windows tools at all.

Jon.