I am not sure why but I had heck of a time installing ESXi 5.5 on my HP 385 G5.
I ended up installing 4.1 first then upgrading to 5.5.
Note that I was installing it on a USB flash drive. I booted to Linux via PXE boot and looked at the disk partitioning and it looked like it was some new EFI boot partition.
Also had another presentation today, went pretty well, I had little prep time due to my time involved in getting my new kart going.
Just doing pushups and situps, getting back in schedule tomorrow.