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
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.
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.
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