Clack Posted December 21, 2021 Share Posted December 21, 2021 I've been reading through the general support forums for a bit now attempting to figure out what on earth is causing my issues where I cannot get the LSI SAS9200-8e attached to an old Dell Optiplex 9020 with 16GB of RAM to access more than one WD RED drive at a time. I'm using a SAS-to-SATA Forward breakout cable to attach to the drives, and I can get each drive to be recognized by the BIOS and Unraid's System Devices report, but when I attempt to plug two or three drives in, the system only recognizes a single disk in Unraid, and the BIOS hard locks and the computer must be rebooted to proceed. SAS card bios (Avago MPT SAS2 BIOS - 7.39.02.00): - SAS9200-8e w/ SAS2008 topology - firmware revision 20.00.07.00-IT - NVDATA version 14.01.00.08 - Plugged into PCI-E 16x port, no other PCI devices attached Drives attached: - total 3 WD Red units, 2 WD20EFRX and 1 WD20EFZX - 1 SanDisk 240GB SSD attached via internal SATA (Unraid recognizes just fine) I'm hazarding a guess that it's either the cable or there's something else going on with the SAS board. Before I start throwing hardware (and money) at the issue, does anyone have any suggestions? Any advice is appreciated! tower-diagnostics-20211221-1345.zip Quote Link to comment
JorgeB Posted December 21, 2021 Share Posted December 21, 2021 Very strange issue, can you try the HBA with all the disks in a different PC? Quote Link to comment
Clack Posted December 21, 2021 Author Share Posted December 21, 2021 Unfortunately this is the only PC I have at the moment. I'm cursed with laptops surrounding me. Quote Link to comment
Solution Clack Posted December 26, 2021 Author Solution Share Posted December 26, 2021 After much gnashing of teeth, buying additional hardware, wailing, and utlimately pleading with the Computer Gods (Praise Be Unto Linus, He of the Free Software) I figured out what is happening. This update is for anyone else running into this issue going into the future. Dell BIOS, as best as I can tell, has an incomplete or buggy Legacy Boot option and needs a UEFI Boot to properly identify all the devices on the SAS9200-8e HBA. Poster Mthrboard over on Serverbuilds.net posted an excellent how-to guide on updating the LSI HBAs with a UEFI-capable BIOS for boot, and following it to the letter updated my board firmware, BIOS, and most importantly from what I can tell, the UEFI ROM loaded on the 9200-8e. The firmware, ROMs and appropriate sas2flash EFI versions are present in their links, and following the update procedures there allowed me to boot with the HBA via UEFI. I booted into the Windows instance I temporarily installed and found that every drive is present and running fine, and from there Unraid recognized all the drives and I have my 30-day trial running successfully. Special thanks again to Mthrboard over at Serverbuilds.net for posting up that how-to that basically solved every issue I've had with this Dell Optiplex-based server build. I also happen to have an extra forward breakout SAS-to-SATA cable as well as a pre-flashed SAS9207-8E to put up on eBay real cheap sometime soon. 2 Quote Link to comment
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