Dell R640 w/ Dell H200e 12DNW Controller

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All -

I'm new to the enterprise server world and need some help on figuring out what I am missing.

I currently have my R640 attached through the controller to an external storage array (Lenovo SA120).

I was able to boot from my usb stick with FreeNAS 11.2 on it and install it to my SSD that is located in the external storage, I also was able to see all 8x HGST HE6 6TB drives that are in it.

After successfully installing and removing the USB stick. I cannot figure out how to get the server to boot from that SSD that is in the external storage. I've looked over every bios menu and under boot options, it only has a NIC option or USB option. What am I missing here?

Thanks.

 

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I found another post that stated a similar issue:

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...0-so-very-stuck-and-so-very-frustrated.55389/

And also this one about cross flashing:

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/crossflash-dell-h200e-to-lsi-9200-8e.41307/

Going to try this first and will report back.

 

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Ok, so spent the last few hours trying to make this work and running into issues.

I tried following the instructions and made a USB freedos boot and followed the crossflash guide i posted above. Problem is they reference unziping the P7 sas2flsh.exe to p7 directory, and that file doesn't exist in the zip they link.

Not knowing that that file is likely important for each version. I tried taking the sas2flsh.exe from the p20 version, but never got to that part.

In UEFI boot mode my R640 says the USB stick isn't bootable. I read somewhere that you need to move to legacy mode to make things work. Tried it on another PC of mine and sure enough I get to FreeDOS. When I switch my R640 to Bios mode which is supposed to be like Legacy, it just gets stuck after telling me it sees the SAS card and the cursor just sits there doing nothing. I shut down the unit removed the 12DNW and sure enough I could get to FreeDOS. I'm not sure why this stops me.

So I tried then to use my other PC to flash this thing but then I get the PAL error. Looking up that more it involves downloading sas2flash.efi from lsi, but I can't find it for the 9200-8e. Not to mention I still haven't found the the sas2flsh.exe from above. Oddly enough, in my PC it did give me the CTRL + C prompt to enter the cards settings. I didn't spend much time in here, but did notice the hardware raid was disabled and didn't see if I could change that.

What is my route to get this all to work?

 

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I attached an SSD directly to the internal USB drive as I had one sitting around and was trying to avoid using an USB Drive for my boot drive. The previous install worked. I have not setup any of my array's yet as I am following the burn in resource for the drives including my spares.

The install does not show any alerts though. I believe my HBA was already in IT mode, so I am hoping I don't need to do anything to it.