Dell H310 flashing questions

[nnhoang]

Hopefully flashing cards falls under general unRAID support. My apologies if this is in the wrong area to ask.

 

I bought two Dell H310 cards, one was stock with Dell's default firmware on it and the other one, the guy said he had already flashed it to IT mode.

 

I used this tutorial to flash the card with the default firmware and everything went pretty smooth other than a few UEFI issues. When I had it with the stock dell firmware, there was a bootmenu for the card, but after flashing it to IT mode there's no boot menu. I believe I did it properly as I can see the bare drives CLI with a blkid command.

 

With that, I pop out the card out and add the other card already flashed into IT mode to check it and unlike the other card, it has a boot menu so I went in to check it out. It's kinda nice, shows information on the drives, which slot it's in, ability to turn off/on smart data, etc. Useful information. I tried contacting the guy to get details on what he flashed it to and I'm waiting on a reply, but I wanted to ask the community if they knew what he flashed it as?

 

On the main menu on top it says "LSI Corp Config Utility  For Dell SAS Ctlr v7.11.10.00 (2011.06.02)"

 

Digging into the menu, I found a bit more details.

Adapter - SAS9211-8i

MPT Firmware Revision 20.00.07.00-IT
NVDATA Version 14.01.00.08

 

Any help appreciated, I would want to have my other card flashed to the same or similar firmware so I can check on the drives during boot time. Thanks!

[Hoopster]

25 minutes ago, nnhoang said:

I would want to have my other card flashed to the same or similar firmware so I can check on the drives during boot time.

The difference is that you can flash the card with or without the BIOS for the card. 

 

Without BIOS = no menu during boot with attached drive information.

 

I also have a Dell H310 and chose to cross flash it to IT mode without the BIOS.  I just wanted the drives to be seen by unRAID and had no interest in the card BIOS appearing during boot as it lengthens boot time.

 

I do not recall which flashing tutorial/guide I followed, but, somewhere in the process an option was presented to flash with or without the BIOS.

 

UPDATE:  Here is a tutorial for flashing with the BIOS.  It is optional (as explained in step 16).

Edited June 24, 2020 by Hoopster

[DivideBy0]

sas2flash.exe -o -f 2118it.bin -b mptsas2.rom if I remember correctly.

 

firmware and bios together 

 

[nnhoang]

Thanks for the help, this community seems great already. I got the BIOS menu running on both of my H310 cards.