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Will the LSI SAS 9201-16i card work out of the box?


swoy

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I have the same card and it works in 5.1 (not yet upgraded to 5.2). You need to flash the right firmware to the SAS card before using it and there were also some issues with a specific version of firmware for this card.

 

Ah, here it is:

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=4985

 

P20 firmware is bad, P19 is ok as I have this one aswell.

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Thanks for the info!

 

I have located the firmware from LSI site, the 9201-16i_Package_P19_IT_Firmware_BIOS_for_MSDOS_Windows zip.

 

I am very new to this, so if someone could maybe point me in the direction of where I can read a step-by-step guide?

Do I need to boot MS-DOS on the server?

 

Cheers in advance,

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Thanks for the info!

 

I have located the firmware from LSI site, the 9201-16i_Package_P19_IT_Firmware_BIOS_for_MSDOS_Windows zip.

 

I am very new to this, so if someone could maybe point me in the direction of where I can read a step-by-step guide?

Do I need to boot MS-DOS on the server?

 

Cheers in advance,

 

EDIT:

Lol, I see now that you have an old mainboard with a BIOS so everything below is not entirely relevant for your case, however I do believe the commands for flashing the LSI controller are the same, but you can do them from a DOS prompt.

 

 

Well, it kind of depends if your mainboard has a UEFI or a BIOS. Most systems nowadays use UEFI and this is quite a bit different than flashing firmware from DOS command prompt.

 

I have a UEFI mainboard so I launched a UEFI shell. You will have to look up how to do this yourself as it can be different for each mainboard, you often need a shellx64.efi file and put this together with the firmware files on a FAT32 formatted USB stick and figure out how to boot from this stick, sometimes you can do it from the UEFI 'BIOS', but it's not always the same. It took me quite some time to figure it out, but if you have a UEFI mainboard you have to do it this way as you can't do it from a DOS prompt as far as I can remember. :geek:

 

Once you're in the UEFI shell you can do the following (remember that this is all at your own risk!):

 

type:

map

to list all available filesystems

 

mount fs*:

* = number of filesystem to mount use command

 

To open filesystem type:

fs1:

 

Type:

ls

to list contents of the filesystem.

 

---

 

Commands to flash LSI controller:

 

 

This command puts the sas2flsh command into advanced mode (-o) and then erases the flash (-e 6) firmware and BIOS:

sas2flash.efi -o -e 6

 

:!:Rebooting at this point would cause the HBA to cease functioning as the article warns: :!:

 

:!:DO NOT REBOOT. If you do reboot, or if you attempt to flash the firmware and/or BIOS image and it does not flash correctly, you will have to RMA the controller. :!:

 

 

The following command will flash the controller:

sas2flash.efi -o -f [filename of firmware].bin -b mptsas2.rom

 

Use this command to check the firmware version of the controller:

sas2flsh -listall

 

If it's all good you can safely reboot your machine. :cool:

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EDIT:

Lol, I see now that you have an old mainboard with a BIOS so everything below is not entirely relevant for your case, however I do believe the commands for flashing the LSI controller are the same, but you can do them from a DOS prompt.

 

Thank you for coming through with advice, it is much appreciated. I have looked across the web for solutions, and I opened up my main driver which has UEFI BIOS

It's a Gigabyte GA-Z97N-Gaming 5 (Mini ITX).

 

I tried to first go down the path of using reFind, to no awail, I get the message "InitShellApp: application not started from shell". I searched more on this subject and I could read that I had to use some Shellx64.efi file onto a fat32 usb and boot from it. I tried to change BIOS settings to get it to boot into that shell, but had no luck.

 

So I then tried to do it the DOS way on my main driver, made the DOS bootable and booting it successfully, only to discover that I cannot, with the message: "ERROR: Failed to initialize PAL. Exiting program." Apparently Intel 3000 or 5000-based boards have optionROM limitations which cause the above error. I do not have the knowledge to solve this.

 

After that, I kinda got frustrated, so I opened up the Server, which I have the GA-965P-DQ6 with Intel P965+ ICH8R chipset installed. I mounted the card and fired her up, only to see that the SAS bios is initializing AFTER the bios, as opposed to before on the GA-z97N... And with this comes the issue where it says something like "MPT boot ROM. No supported boot devices found."

 

I am at the brink of giving up, is there something I do wrong? How can I have the SAS card from halting the system and prevent Xpenology to boot from the USB stick?

I assume that if I can find a way to get past the message: "MPT boot ROM. No supported boot devices found." during boot, I can fire up DOS and downgrade.

 

Many thanks in advance for any support :smile:

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  • 2 weeks later...

This is a normal message if no hard disks are connected to the SCSI bus. The boot ROM on the SCSI adapters can be disabled within the setup which can be entered right before you receive this message if you do not intend to boot from any device connected to the SCSI bus. You should see a message that says "Press Control-C to start LSI Logic Configuration Utility...". Once in there, select an adapter and look for "Boot Support" and turn it off.

You should also check the BIOS settings for the boot order, but you may have to remove the card first to get in your mainboard's BIOS.

 

 

Some more info and links to EFI shell files for different EFI versions (this is what makes it a pain to get the shell to function properly as you need the same version as your mainboard's EFI version):

 

http://forums.tweaktown.com/asus/52327- ... evice.html

 

You can also try the Shellx64.efi which I used, though I'm not sure if it will work for you:

 

http://1drv.ms/1TUYc7s

 

It's quite some time ago since I did this on my HBA so I'm not entirely sure how I got it working eventually, but I do remember it taking me some time (thanks to the annoying EFI shell).

Also, I wouldn't have got it to work if I gave up on it and you shouldn't either (otherwise send me your HBA please)... :ugeek:

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  • 2 weeks later...

Thank you very much for the info, unfortunately, it seems like the MB is too old or something, as I cannot get past the hang from the HBA bios whatever I do in the MB bios. So instead I went out and picked up a Supermicro MBD-X9SRH-7F-O with 64GB of Hynix RDIMMs and slammed a Xeon E5-2630V2 / 2.6 GHz inside. My wife will kill me, but I now run ESXI 5.5 with I/O passthrough to the XPEnology server, the migration went smooth and no data was lost, even after moving the 8 drives from previously being on the Marvell controller of the old MB, over to the HBA through ESXI. I don't think I will ever go back from the hypervisor world!

 

I can finally play around with new updates and also run other servers. The only downside I can find with the Supermicro card, is that they delivered it with an old BIOS and they charge you extra for a licence to update it through the IPMI... So the only good way of doing an update, was through the following (great) link: http://www.bhargavs.com/index.php/2014/ ... -bootable/

 

As a last note, thank you guys for coming through and assist me on the journey, and I would highly recommend the LSI SAS 9201-16i card to anyone who is in dire need of more sata/sas expansion. This bad boy can do 512 disks with expanders. It's crazy (Too bad we can't get DSM to recognize more than 12 though).

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