How to solve the VMware “PCI to PCI bridge detected” install loop
Have you ever P2Ved a server to an ESX cluster or converted a VMware Workstation VM into a VMware ESX 3.5 or vSphere 4.0 VM and come across this horrible Found New Hardware message that won’t go away. Here’s a screenshot of a Windows 2000 Advanced Server that I had to fix and P2V after a catastrophic disaster (RAID failure) displaying this message:
Yes, it’s annoying and it seems like it will never go away. You keep click on install and it keeps detecting after sucessfully installing as if it’s in a loop. But the reality of it is that it’s not in a loop. As silly as it sounds, you have to install it 32 times and it will finally go away! 
The reason for this is because when you update the VM’s virtual hardware (specifically version 7 VMs from my experience), it comes with 32 separate PCI-to-PCI bridge devices that Windows detects and wants to install. The only workaround I have found so far is to just sit there and install all 32 manually. Or you can try editing your VMX and set:
pciBridge.present = False
which should work though I’ve never tried it personally. Don’t want to potentially break something when it takes all of 2 minutes to install all 32 bridges. Give it a shot and let me know if that fixes it for you guys.
