Trouble flashing H310 on r510

[blakestock]

Hey everyone,

FreeNAS new guy here. I'm building a FreeNAS box with a Dell r510 and bought a perc H310 6GB SAS/SATA PCI-e 3P0R3 from Ebay that I've been reading up on how to flash it to IT mode. I've followed several guides from here and from Googling but none seem to be getting me anywhere. Last article I tried was this one. The H310 works fine as a RAID card and I can build arrays so that tells me it at least works.

I've got a USB flash drive to boot to FreeDOS and it also has all the LSI firmware files on it too. When I boot to FreeDOS and start issuing commands is where I'm having problems. Any switches used sas2flsh.exe comes back something like "No LSI cards found". I can issue "megacli.exe -AdpAllInfo -aAll -page 20" and it spits out all kinds of information about the card including the SAS address. Anytime I issue any commands for megarec.exe to get started flashing is where I have issues. I'll try to issue "megarec.exe -writesbr 0 sbrempty.bin" and it's like it just hangs forever and the only thing I can do is reboot the server. The program never says that the card is in Fusion mode or the sbr write failed. I've let it sit for 2 hours and no luck still...

https://imgur.com/f5RPUOl - here's what the screen looks like when it hangs

Any Ideas of what is going on?

Thanks!

 

[jgreco]

Welcome to the joys of crossflashing. You may need to do it in another machine, or you may find a workaround. In the shop here, it's sometimes been necessary to use even two different machines to complete flashing a set of cards (not too unusual to do four or more at a time). I generally don't bother trying to figure out "the problem" anymore because the pragmatic fix is just to move the card to another box.

 

[Stefan75]

I flashed my card (Fujitsu D2607) in an old desktop using the dos (non uefi) executables. The commands should all run in seconds (or up to 2min max).

 

[jgreco]

Flashing the card and doing a crossflash from the Dell firmware to LSI IT mode are kind of two different things. The more recent LSI tools are designed to prevent OEM cards from being updated to plain LSI, so at least in some cases you have to do some fairly arcane process that involves rolling the card back to P7 (where the LSI tools didn't check for OEM cards), switching o IT, smashing the SBR, moving the card over look like an "LSI" card with a new SBR, and then installing P20. I have to say, with lots of experience with doing this over the years, and having had to troubleshoot crossflashes-gone-awry a bunch of times, the guide that @Stilez put together here is very full of good information.

However, following an existing guide for a specific card may be easier.

 

[Chris Moore]

When I boot to FreeDOS and start issuing commands is where I'm having problems. Any switches used sas2flsh.exe comes back something like "No LSI cards found".

If you have a system with a UEFI (instead of a BIOS) you can't boot to FreeDOS and use the .exe file.
You have to use the UEFI instructions instead.

 

[blakestock]

@jgreco, thanks for the suggestion of trying to flash it in another machine. I'll try that tonight when I get home from work in my r710 and see if it's any different there. I've also got another Intel server that isn't in use anymore and I've flashed a SAS card from there once. Crossing my fingers its as easy as flashing from another server.

Thanks to everyone else too! Update to come!

 

[blakestock]

So I was able to start flashing the H310 via The Guide and this blog post, I had to put it in a different server. Now it's as if the card isn't able to boot off of it. When the server is booting, I no longer see anything about the PERC card and settings as a boot step.

I did however run through the FreeNAS install and I can see a couple of the HDDs that I have connected for testing. When I finished running through the install process, that said it completed successfully to a HDD connected to the card, and reboot the server it doesn't boot into FreeNAS. Am I missing something?

 

[Zredwire]

The card has both a firmware and a BIOS ROM. When you cleared the card it erased both. If you just installed the firmware and not the BIOS ROM then you won't be able to boot from that controller but it will work fine inside FreeNAS. If you want to boot from the controller you will need to flash the BIOS ROM back onto it.

 

[blakestock]

So I'm going through the flashing process again from scratch and having issues with the card again. Now, whenever I issue: "megarec.exe -writesbr 0 sbrempty.bin" it reports back that the card is in Fusion mode and the command was a "success". Every guide says this should fail and if it does then to proceed, but it doesn't say what to do when it repeatedly succeeds...

Any suggestions? I'm about to throw this thing out the window, never had so much trouble with a server...

Thanks for your help!

 

[Chris Moore]

I don't think that is correct. Why would you do something with the purpose of getting a failure?
I would need to review the instructions again, but I don't remember a failure being the goal.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[Zredwire]

I have flashed three of the H310 cards and I don't remember any step that should fail. I think you are good to go. Proceed to the next step. It did take me about an hour and a half to do the first card. After that it only took me about 10min per card, lol.

 

[blakestock]

I don't think that is correct. Why would you do something with the purpose of getting a failure?
I would need to review the instructions again, but I don't remember a failure being the goal.

I questioned that too, but its listed in the step of this guide. Probably just a type-o and I'm just being too literal at this point.

I think I've definitely got this card into IT mode, but I'm having troubles with getting it to boot. I just tried to flash mptsas2.rom to it and it seems to show it listed as an Avago technologies boot device now. But after installing FreeNAS from a USB stick to a HDD attached to the HBA, the server still says there's no boot device attached. FreeNAS install saw the HDD and installed to it, and during boot up the card initialized. Maybe that rom isn't the right one to use?

Any guidance on which file to flash to it so I can boot to this device? Originally, it's a Dell H310.

 

[Chris Moore]

I questioned that too, but its listed in the step of this guide. Probably just a type-o and I'm just being too literal at this point.

What it means is, whether it passes or fails, not that it must fail.

I think I've definitely got this card into IT mode, but I'm having troubles with getting it to boot.

You are not supposed to boot from the SAS controller.

 

[blakestock]

I got it working!!! Wow that was a pain...

Ended up having to use two systems to get the commands to take. When connected to the R510 (FreeNAS server), it wouldn't take the BIOS commands to clear the card. After putting it into another server, I was able to get it to flash to IT mode and finally accept the rom file too. Now with the H310 in the R510 it boots as expected!

You are not supposed to boot from the SAS controller.

The R510 has 8 3.5" bays on it and my plan was to have 2 of those bays for FreeNAS OS mirror and the remaining 6 for a RAIDz2 pool. All the drives connect to the H310 that's in IT mode now. Are you saying this is a bad option to build this way?

Sorry, very new to FreeNAS and thought I read enough to understand how to best use it.

 

[Chris Moore]

I would use a SSD in one of these adapters to replace the CD drive and use all 8 3.5 hot-swap bays for storage drives.
https://www.amazon.com/Protronix-Optical-Drive-Universal-12-7mm/dp/B004XIU4T2
A single SSD is plenty reliable because FreeeNAS only uses it a teeny tiny little bit. I have a 40 GB boot device and after using it for over three years there is only 7.9 GB actually used and the amount of data transfer is pretty low. It will outlast every drive you ever put in the thing even if you start with a used SSD.
EDIT:
The CD drive should connect to a built-in SATA controller, but you don't need a CD drive with FreeNAS.

 

[Chris Moore]

It may be an optional component but there is a place inside the chassis for two non hot-swap drive bays. You can see it on page 99 and 100 of the owners manual:
http://downloads.dell.com/manuals/all-products/esuprt_ser_stor_net/esuprt_poweredge/poweredge-r510_owner's manual_en-us.pdf
You can also see it briefly photographed on page 26 of the technical guide:
http://i.dell.com/sites/doccontent/...ments/dell-poweredge-r510-technical-guide.pdf

 

[jgreco]

It may be an optional component but there is a place inside the chassis for two non hot-swap drive bays. You can see it on page 99 and 100 of the owners manual:
http://downloads.dell.com/manuals/all-products/esuprt_ser_stor_net/esuprt_poweredge/poweredge-r510_owner's manual_en-us.pdf
You can also see it briefly photographed on page 26 of the technical guide:
http://i.dell.com/sites/doccontent/...ments/dell-poweredge-r510-technical-guide.pdf

Yes. Depending on the chassis model. In the 12-drive configuration, this comes prewired into the backplane SAS expander, which means you'd need to boot from the SAS controller. The mainboard SATA ports are disabled in that configuration, and there aren't good options for internal boot, so I ended up deploying a system for a client that had an H200i subbed in for the standard H710i, and then added an H310 along with an Addonics card and a pair of M.2 SATA SSD's for boot. I believe the 8-bay unit has the SATA enabled but they still make it difficult to tap power.