I have been troubleshooting some crashes on my unraid server for the last couple weeks, after checking everything software I could think of, I moved onto the hardware, after re-seating my ram I decided to update my motherboards bios. The bios in my board was from 2019, and there are updates all the up to 2021. 
 

The update went fine. Except for some weird reason now my Adaptec raid card is just...gone. It’s like it’s not even in the system. It should show in the bios, and it doesn’t. It also doesn’t show up anywhere in unraid. 

 

I did notice that immediately following the Mobo bios update that I saw the Adaptec “Press CTRL + A” screen which was odd because I had disabled it back when I first bought the card. The boot failed because I didn’t realize the update reset my settings, and it was actually trying to boot from the HBA. after putting my bios settings back to boot from my unraid usb, I tried again. This time I saw another Adaptec boot screen with the message “BIOS not installed” and my system then booted into unraid, and there has been no sign of my Adaptec card since other than it’s leds do still blink when booting.

 

I read the manual for the card i found a section on how to reset the card, but it just tells you to refer to “the read me”....but I have no idea what read me it’s talking about.

 

Mobo: Asus rog strix B450f gaming

CPU: Ryzen 5 2600

HBA: Adaptec 71605 1G

Edited April 26, 20215 yr by relink
Solved

I have finally found some more info, including the missing “readme” however when it comes to the instructions for resetting everything I have found says to just contact Adaptec...not very helpful.

 

of course I didn’t do anything afaik that should have messed with the raid cards bios...

Oh man this seems to get getting worse and worse. 
 

I made a freeDOS bootable USB and got a copy of the cards latest bios and the flashing utility. I load it up and get the error “no known controllers detected. Quitting”

 

has anyone ever had something similar happen? I find it very hard to believe my raid controller just died out of the blue like that. Are there any bios settings on my Mobo I should look for?

Different PCIe slot?

22 minutes ago, jonathanm said:

Different PCIe slot?

Literally just finished trying that and it does seem to work in another pcie slot. But I had to swap with my GPU and the GPU is also still working. 
 

I keep my HBA in the top pcie x16 slot so it’ll get all 8 lanes it needs, then my NVME, GPU, AND NIC all get X4, and it’s been like that for over a month now. The bios update has to have done SOMETHING that is causing it to not initialize the raid card when it’s in slot one. I’m going to tray swapping back and see what happens. 

Swapped it back and it’s gone again.

 

something changed with this BIOS update and I cannot figure out what it is. I’m currently reading the Mobo manual and it’s not very helpful so far. I’m going to read through all the release notes for the bios versions. 
 

something is different, I just need to find out what...

I think I might have got it, and shame on ASUS for this one.
 

For whatever reason they decided to give the top PCIe slot 2 different modes that you have to manually change “X16” and “PCIe RAID Mode”, now what’s confusing is if you read the help at the bottom of the screen this option talks about enabling this for a single specific m.2 expander card, nowhere does it say it’s used for anything else.

 

To make matters worse not only is the change not reflected in the manual on the ASUS website, the entire section is missing from the manual, and none of this was documented in the change logs for the BIOS updates. I can’t believe I just spent 4 hours trouble shooting every inch of my server, only to find out it was an undocumented change to the BIOS...

 

Since I am far from the only person with an AM4 ASUS board, and I’m sure in not the only one who doesn’t put their transcoding GPU in slot one the solution to this is below;

 

In your BIOS go to;

Advanced > Onboard devices configuration

 

then change;

 

PCIEX16_1

 to

PCIe RAID Mode

 

This also solved issues I was having on my Plex server.

It is an x570 Asus board with the Adaptec 71605, and if I tried anything more than simply streaming movies from Plex, something would lock up and all drives would go offline.

So like if I would try to clear a new disk, while the system was running normally, it was a 90%chance the clear would fail, or the system would say multiple drives had read errors.

All I did yesterday was change the PCIE slot in BIOS to PCIE RAID MODE and from Auto to Gen3, and the system has been clearing a new drive overnight perfectly, and at triple the speed it was just a couple days ago when it would fail and crash.

 

Mine is offsite at my office so dealing a a crash is a royal PITA. So far so good, 20+ hrs of trouble free 'working' - fingers crossed - knock on wood. Thank You for the tip.

Sorry for the necro on this, but just wanted to say thanks. I have a Biostar B85s3+ that wasn't recognizing my Adaptec 81605ZQ, though it worked in another PC. The problem ended up being that I had set set the PCIEX16_1 to Gen 2 rather than Gen 3 or Auto.