I have recently acquired a new Ryzen desktop based on the X370 chipset and its associated SATA controller. I was having problems in high I/O scenarios, so I tried to use an old SAS controller I had (Dell SAS 6/ir.) I attached my SATA hard drive to the SAS controller and it booted off the SATA hard drive fine. However, after booting the datastore was not available. The SAS HBA and the hard drive was visible, and I could view the partition layout of the drive. But nothing I did would allow me to access the old datastore. I eventually reconnected to the motherboard's onboard SATA controller, and my old VMs and datastore were once again available.
The fact that I can boot indicates that ESXi can access the hard drive, but something is preventing it from seeing the datastore after booting. Or maybe I'm missing a step in adding the datastore. Any suggestions?