SOLVED Dell R510 & Avago / LSI 9211-8i IT

[MelThorpe]

I picked up this card that was already cross flashed from an H200 to the Avago / LSI 9211-8i IT.

When I boot, it shows all the disks, I can install FreeNAS to one of the drives in the 2.5" bay, the FreeNAS installer doesn't throw any errors, but when I reboot, it never boots from that drive. It says there are no valid boot devices.

I know it can boot from the H700 card and I can build a couple virtual disks and install ESXi. I did that as a test, but I would like to have FreeNAS directly accessing the drives.

Any suggestions?

 

[jgreco]

Did you put the BIOS on the H200 card? Failing to do that would be the typical screwup trap that some of the guides lead you into.

 

[MelThorpe]

Hmmmm.... I bought the card already flashed. How do I check to see if there is a BIOS on it? I know there is a Configuration Utility, but there is nothing in there that seems to be helpful.

 

[MelThorpe]

I got it booting FreeNAS now by this tidbit:

"You need to reboot the system and press Ctrl-C to enter the LSI configuration utility.

At the main screen make sure 'Boot Order' is set to 0 and 'Boot Support' is set to 'Enabled BIOS & OS'.

Then select 'SAS Topology', get a list of the attached devices, highlight the SSD you want to boot from, and press Alt-B to make it the preferred boot device. Press 'Alt+M' ('More Keys') to see other available options.

I'm working from memory here, so you may have to do a little self-guided exploration... but the gist of it is that you need to specify the device you want to boot from. Then your BIOS will boot from that drive ('Hard drive C:') in the expected way."

From this post

Now to see if I can finish setting this box up. =)

 

[Ericloewe]

Do you have to boot from an SAS controller? As you're experiencing, that adds hoops to jump through over just booting from AHCI (SATA), and every hoop you add has a non-zero chance of catching on fire at some point.

 

[MelThorpe]

This particular box has the onboard SATA connections disabled, all the drives are connected to the same backplane/controller. I could add another card to the machine, but I would rather not. Its working as I need it to right now.

 

[Ericloewe]

This particular box has the onboard SATA connections disabled, all the drives are connected to the same backplane/controller. I could add another card to the machine, but I would rather not. Its working as I need it to right now.

Well, if you can't boot from SATA (or conceivably a PCIe SSD, AHCI or NVMe), then LSI SAS is my next best choice. I'm not optimistic about any of the el-cheapo SATA cards out there.

Also, if your system has UEFI, the UEFI extension ROM for the card installs a driver that allows you to manage the card from the system firmware setup menu, including boot settings. If you try that out, tell us how it goes.

 

[MelThorpe]

The controller is a LSI/Avago controller that was OEM'd to Dell as the H200.

UEFI is disabled on this machine.

I marked this one resolved because I was able to select the drive I installed FreeNAS on in a buried menu item of the LSI/Avago controller and was able to get it up and running.

 

[jgreco]

Do you have to boot from an SAS controller? As you're experiencing, that adds hoops to jump through over just booting from AHCI (SATA), and every hoop you add has a non-zero chance of catching on fire at some point.

Yes he does, more or less. The only other viable alternatives on the R510 in this configuration are external USB hanging off the back or an internal USB slot buried on the drive backplane. Both these options suck.

I had a client who had almost a dozen of these donated. Because they're running in data centers, nonredundant USB wasn't a good idea. I added an H310 crossflashed to IR mode to each unit, and then because there's nowhere you can reasonably get SATA power from inside these machines, I added one of those Addonics M.2 cards I sorta like, which added two powered spots for M.2 SATA SSD. Then added some cheap M.2 64GB SATA SSD's. This can be configured either for "hardware" RAID1, where the controller is responsible for making sure the boot device is viable, but ZFS will not be able to correct any errors it identifies, or you can use them as two separate devices passed to ZFS, which has the downside that if one of them gets corrupted in just the wrong way, it is possible that the unit won't boot. Neither is perfect, alas.