Disconnect the backplane before flashing the HBA!

[veritas]

EDIT: IT SEEMS LIKE THE ISSUE WASN'T WITH THE BACKPLANE AFTER ALL - SEE BELOW

Learn from my mistake... Before flashing my first LSI-9300-8i I read somewhere in a comment that the backplane (in my case a BPN-SAS3-846EL1) needed to be disconnected, so I made sure it wasn't plugged in and I was able to flash the HBA to IT mode with 16.00.12.00 with no problems.

Did a second one three months later and forgot about that caveat, so I went through the exact same procedure but flashed it with the backplane connected. Big mistake. Now I'm getting a long list of errors on bootup, several of my recently badblocked brand new drives are suddenly reporting bad sectors (no idea why or if this incorrectly reported). The LSI-9300-8i appears to be flashed correctly. Now I'll have to see how/if I can recover the backplane, bad block all the drives again to see if there are truly suddenly bad sectors from this, no idea why that would happen. There is a possibility that this problem is only because when I did sas3flsh.efi -list, it showed the SAS address of the backplane rather than the LSI, and then when I did sas3flsh.efi -o -sasadd 50060SASADDRESSHEREXX, I flashed the SAS address of the backplane to the LSI. Apparently that can be an issue, I haven't had a chance to test this yet, fingers crossed it's this simple. But I'm concerned I'll have to somehow try to recover the firmware on the backplane. Will update as I hopefully figure out what happened and how to recover from this.

Perhaps this is common sense which is why it isn't mentioned in more places, but if like me you are new to these things and found this post while searching how to flash your HBA: Make sure to disconnect the cables before flashing!


Disclaimer - I am a beginner with all these things, so do a bit more research rather than taking my write-up at face value.

 

[veritas]

In the end I'm not sure if the backplane was affected or not. I contacted Supermicro for the firmware and flashed it to the latest firmware according to the instructions they provided. On the first attempt it didn't write to all sectors, but when I wrote to all sectors individually (except sector 3) it completed the flashing.

However, the errors on booting into Ubuntu remained the same:

For search: blk_update_request_ I/O error, dev sdm, sector 1953287056 op 0x0: (READ) flags 0x80700 phys_seg 2 prio class 0

The drives were all okay when tested in a different systems, they weren't actually damaged as this seems to suggest.

I ordered some new cables because others reported the exact same type of error and it was fixed by adding new cables (e.g. here), but no difference.

I then managed to get the backplane into a different system with a different HBA and it booted up perfectly.

Then I tried the HBA with a different backplane and the errors reappeared, so the issue must have been with the HBA. I'm not entirely sure but I believe there were some issues during bootup when plugging the HBA into the system before I even tried flashing it to 16.00.12.00. Perhaps it was damaged, or perhaps it's because it was branded as a Fujitsu CP400i, and/or it was for some reason incompatible with my Supermicro X9SCM-F. I ended up flashing it probably a dozen times in different ways, no luck (see here for extra Fujitsu-specific instructions files). In the end I returned the HBA and bought an actual non-Fujitsu (or Dell) LSI 9300-8i, let's hope this fixes it.