ESXi 6.5 Stuck on Initializing Scheduler
PSOD PCPU1 could not start

I’m making this post short to note this odd experience with this host build.

First weird thing was when trying to install ESXi I couldn’t get past vmkusb not sure what it was about but only found this decent reddit post with the same problem.

In short he noticed it would only get past this if a second USB was plugged into the USB2 ports, and sure enough that worked for me too. strange….

Then a couple days later while doing some more test boots, I get a Purple screen of death, complaining about the PCPU1 not starting or some shit, ugh again lets see what others have to say… well I found this vmware thread on it, he basically stated that resetting the BIOS settings worked, after farting around with some bios settings, I had other failed boots and my CPU and system was rather hot. I let everything cool down, added more powerful fans and tried again after resetting the BIOS to factory and much like the post it worked.

After finalizing the build a little more, I switched to an old 2.5″ HDD.. same problem but I noticed it gets stuck on initializing scheduler before PSODing, while I searched for what might be up with that I found this

It did help shit, same problem next boot, instead of just resetting the BIOS I played around with a couple more settings like I enabled intel AES-NI which helps for CPU offloading of AES computations. and another one which I sadly forgot, and then my next boot was fine. saving this at this point in case it comes back again.