First of all, let me state that this has nothing to do with unRAID. I recently bought a SC846 chassis and it contained a H8DME-2 ver.2.01 motherboard. I saw the thread at: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=18610.135 and I decided to post here in the hope of attracting the right people. I am trying to update the BIOS of this board, but I am encountering a strange issue.

Steps I have taken so far:

1. I used a 256MB USB flash drive, made it into a win 98 boot disk

2. Copied the BIOS update files over to it

3. Server is stock, with 3 sata cards and the ipmi card in it; with the stock CPU and RAM.

4. Server boots off of the flash drive

 

The server boots off the flash drive. I tried to update the BIOS by typing "flash DM82A229.ROM" (without the quotes). The server rebooted instantly and the BIOS revision was still listed as 2.x. I edited the flash.bat file and changed ECHO off to ECHO on. That way I could see what was happening. I ran the BIOS update again, this time I see that it hangs after this command:

AFUDOS.EXE DM82A229.ROM /P /B /N /C

I attached a screenshot of the update attempt.  I did let it sit here for 30+ minutes. I have exhausted my google fu skills trying to solve this issue.  I am hoping that someone here can help me.

Are you sure this is the right bios flash for this board.  Does not look like it to me. I had no issue flashing this bios exept for trigering the flash manually.  The whole instructions are on supermicro site, along with 3.5 bioa version which is the latest.

 

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Pretty sure it is the correct BIOS. My board is 2.01 revision. I know that six core processors are not officially supported on this board revision, but others had luck with getting it to work in the other thread I mentioned above. The site I went to for the mobo: http://www.supermicro.com/aplus/motherboard/opteron2000/mcp55/h8dme-2.cfm

 

I clicked on the "Update Your BIOS" link on the right side of the screen, which took me to a page with two links:

DM82A229.exe

DM82A229.zip

 

I downloaded the .zip and extracted everything but the readme to the root dir of the flash drive.

 

 

seams to be correct files.

now I do not know how did you create your usb drive

what I did was :

 

#1 download this  HP-USB-Disk-Storage formater  "http://download.cnet.com/HP-USB-Disk-Storage-Format-Tool/3000-2094_4-10974082.html"

and "http://www.sevenforums.com/attachments/tutorials/42023d1260810265-ms-dos-bootable-flash-drive-create-win98boot.zip"

 

OR

#2 follow this  for using Rufus util " http://dothisbest.com/how-to/create-a-ms-dos-bootable-usb-flash-drive/"

 

I do not remember which one I used though as I had tried several different utils until I got a good bootable usb.

 

once you have the stick ready copy all files from bios zip file onto it.

 

boot into your bios and play this usb settings to emulate floppy

reboot and folow the update instructions.

it took me 3 tries at one of which  I though I fried the BIOS :-)  but it came back after restart.

if all is working it takes about 10 min to flash it (they say 5 but YMMW)

you must have original CPU in socket 1.

 

 

Thanks for the suggestions, I will try the Rufus util as I have already done it via the HP tool. I might try removing the ipmi card, maybe it is interfering with the BIOS update.

UPDATE: It works! I now have 12 cores at my disposal, thank you vl1969! I used the Rufus utility, but the Win98_bootdisk.iso did not work. Rufus generated an error stating that the iso is in the wrong format. I decided to try and set Rufus to Create a bootable disk using: MS-DOS. Now the server booted to the drive and I was able to flash the BIOS without issue. I should also note that I did remove the IPMI card from the system before flashing the BIOS. The server is now running memtest, and it seems to be stable.

 

Again, a big thank you to vl1969.

you are welcome 

 

it seams like you are building same system I am  :-D

just FYI it is not virtualization friendly as in it does not support PCI pass-through

so if it is in your plans do not invest too much now and just get the new MB/CPU

otherwise it is a very good and capable system to use as straight unriad system.

and with v6 you should be able to do simple virtualization on it that does not require full IOMMU/VT-d support.

 

if interested checkout the link in my sig. for other mods you might want to do with it.

Thanks for the heads up on the virtualization. My plans were to use OpenSUSE as the OS, and run virtualbox on top of it for any virtual machines I want to run. I know virtualbox is not an optimal setup, but I am kinda limited with this hardware. And none of the VM's I will run will need pass through or generate a lot of IO. I want to use OpenSUSE do to its support of Btrfs. But I am tempted by XenServer, since I know that it works with this hardware.

are you copying me?

I am setting up exactly the same machine right now.

and let me tell you BTRFS is the great.

also you do not need virtual box with opensuse.

it supports Xen/KVM natively

I am setting up OS13.1 with Xen (KVM have some issues since the hardware does not fully support IOMMU) but Xen works OK.

my biggest issue right now is setting up data shares with Samba and Proper networking so I can use SophosUTM VM

sweet, I did not know that OS supported Zen. Will have to check that out.

so you are running OS as a guest on Zen, correct?

Well you start by installing opensuse. Do all updates and setup network as needed. Then open yast, ang go to virtuallizaition sectiob and run install hipervisor. Choose xen. It will install all supporting libs. And convert os to dom0. After that reboot and choose os with xen in grub. Than you can use libvirt in yast to create and run vm.

 

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ok, thanks for the info.

I am a total noob when it comes to virtualization, so I really appreciate the info that you have given me. On that note, I am not sure on which setup (OS w/VB on top or OS/Zen) would be right for me. I was thinking of going with OS/VB because of the following considerations:

1. The server will not be online 24/7, only when I am DL/streaming/using one of the VM's

2. I know that people have had issues with virtualizing similar file systems (ZFS) without pass through enabled

3. Currently, I only have 3 VM's Planned (Monitoring vm running cacti, win 8 vm, and possibly a Mac OS X vm.

 

Like I said, I am not sure on any of this, still researching.

Well you would not be virtualizong the file system. The storage pool wil be on the host.

 

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ok, now i understand.

OK, finally got a chance to work on this project again; I tried to install openSUSE, but the install locked up. I verified the install media, it reported no errors. When I choose the installation option, it loads to a blank page, I let it sit on the blank page for ten minutes; nothing happened. I am running memtest overnight on the server, maybe bad ram. Tomorrow I will try to install again, before I have to go to work.

I determined that there was nothing wrong with the installer, just that it was not using the motherboard's video card. Connected to the server via ipmi, and I am greeted with the installer start screen. Just wanted to make a note of this in case someone else encounters this issue.

I can confirm that as well, but there is a setting in the bios that fixes it. Not sure what it is it , I have been switching and changing stuff until I saw the screen in both veiws.

 

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Hate to dig up an old thread, but is there any advice you could give me in regards with BTRFS? I have been looking at the wiki, and been reading some articles; but I do not yet have a clear idea on what I want to do. Most of the stuff that will be on the server will be media, nothing irreplaceable. So I was thinking that setup a RAID 1 partition for the important stuff (VM's, documents, etc.), and just have the rest spread over one giant partition that contains the rest of the HD's. (10-11 total HD's as of right now) Maybe if you could describe your setup, it will help me determine what I should do.

Unraid does nkt support btrfs. Not yet anyway.

So if you use unraid you have no choice of what to use.

Other than that,  my setup is  still work in progress,  but I will use btrfs for everything.  Right now I have. System booting from a 1tb root partition , have 1tb home partition also btrfs. Each on separate hdd. I had 2 1tb drives that I planned doind a bootable raid1 on but it did not workout, maybe later.

I have a 2tb btrfs drive setup as datastore1 for all my vm and other related files and I have a multidisk btrfs share in raid1 config on 2 3tb disks for my multimedia files that I  am trying to share using samba.

So far most of it works ok but sharing with windows are a bit glitchy so I am researching of what the issue could be.

FYI. If you use btrfs you do not need to use conventional raid, as in using md , you setup btrfs using raid config. It works a litle different from what you used to.

The file system does raid in chunks, not in volumes so you can use devices of different sizes, but in doing so you will loose some capacity as system needs to compensate for that.

And the way it works us that if you use raid1 config it will store 2 copys of the data even if you only have single device. Unlike conventional raid a single device raid1 is normal and not a degraded raid. The whole system worjs on protecting data, it is not targeting device failure per see, like convention raid setup dose, thus an ability to xonfigure raid other than 0 on a single device.

 

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