WOOT! Thanks for reporting back! I just noticed you live 30 mins from me. I actually think I've seen you at the Wal-Mart near you before. I never forget a face.
That's very unlikely :p
I live in Melbourne Australia and we don't have walmart here :)
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Some notes for the users of this board, hopefully this will help others.
To flash the LSI 2308 into IT mode I used the following firmware:
ftp://ftp.supermicro.com/Driver/SAS/LSI/2308/Firmware/IT/
First you need to get the LSI SAS address.
Restart the board; when you see the LSI prompt: "LSI Corporation ... "
Press Control-C on the keyboard (I did it all via IPMI), press Ctrl-C successively until you see "starting configuration utility" because it's quite easy to miss
Once you're in there, press Enter this will show the SAS address
it looks like:
500304800:70a8b00
You need the last 9 digits: so here that would be: 0070a8b00
The DOS instructions do *NOT* work on this board, you must use the UEFI method.
I disconnected all the disks connected to the LSI out of habit for any flashing. Not sure that's required, but I did it just to be safe.
Format a USB stick in FAT32; copy the content of the UEFI folder unto it
The restart the X10SL7-F, press F11 when prompted and select the built-in UEFI option.
Once you're on the UEFI prompt, mount the disk. The list of available disk volume will be shown on the screen:
for me it was fs1, so mount it:
Then I selected that device:
follow the instruction in the SMC2308IT_FW_Flash_Instruction_091012 file:
run SMC2308T.nsh (if you've copied the UEFI folder and not its content from the archive above, do
first)
The goes on for a little while, and right at the end you're prompted for the 9 digits, enter them and press ENTER.
Reboot... that's it... the card is in IT mode now.
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XHCI had to be disabled otherwise FreeNAS wouldn't boot, it refused to mount the root partition, this is done in the BIOS:
Advanced -> PCH-IO Configuration. XHCI Mode has to be set to Disabled
Note to anyone: Do *NOT* enable the watchdog, that only makes your machine reboot after 5 minutes, I had set it without realising and I thought I had a faulty boards for a short while...
I have plenty more questions about FreeNAS, but they aren't specific to this board, so will open another thread. They set the zfs volume differently to what I'm use to simply using the command line...
need to do some benchmarks too...
otherwise so far so good
