Guide: Flashing H310 & H710 Mini to IT Mode 2021-02-20

[fohdeesha]

You might remember fourlynx's guide on flashing the H310 Mini Mono to IT Mode - been working with him on coming up with a similar guide for all variations of the H710 Mini as well so you no longer have to pay 4x the card price to get one crossflashed off ebay. We also cleaned up and automated a lot of the H310 mini guide into the same Live ISO: https://fohdeesha.com/docs/perc/

If this belongs better in a different section please let me know, my first time back since the forum has been revamped

 

[whoisdecoy]

I registered just to say thank you for this link. I had a H710 mini Rev. D1 and it absolutely painless to flash with your guide!! I ended up putting the battery back on afterwards just because iDrac was complaining and what better place to store it.

 

[samwheat90]

Trying to follow the guide but the info command is not working when I boot to FreeDOS. Getting a "Bad command or filename - "info" when I enter it in C:\

 

[Redcoat]

My guess is that you need to run that command from the root of the drive being used as the boot drive - is that actually C:\ in this case?

 

[hescominsoon]

Search for artofserver on YouTube. He has a serious of videos on flashing those cards. If you do not want to screw with it he also has an Ebay store where he sells these cards already flashed...:)

 

[Ericloewe]

Is there anything along these lines for the equivalent SAS3 hardware?

Edit: To answer my own question, yes there is, to some extent.

 

[petermc60]

You might remember fourlynx's guide on flashing the H310 Mini Mono to IT Mode - been working with him on coming up with a similar guide for all variations of the H710 Mini as well so you no longer have to pay 4x the card price to get one crossflashed off ebay. We also cleaned up and automated a lot of the H310 mini guide into the same Live ISO: https://fohdeesha.com/docs/perc/

If this belongs better in a different section please let me know, my first time back since the forum has been revamped

Hi There,
Just wanted to say "thank you" for you guides to flashing the H710 mini. I did run into a problem with my attempt and am not sure if this is the forum to ask you about it. I apologize if I am out of line.

Running a Dell R720, with the H710p mini D1 variant. Ran the dos iso and wiped the card fine. However - even trying to launch the Linux iso from the Lifecycle Controller of the 720 I cannot get the Linux iso to boot. Each time I try I get a fatal error and the 720 simply reboots after a fatal error message.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I know that the method that you put together works as I have friends who have gone that route with success,

Thank You all for the forums - much good stuff here. - PMc

 

[fohdeesha]

Trying to follow the guide but the info command is not working when I boot to FreeDOS. Getting a "Bad command or filename - "info" when I enter it in C:\

you should be able to just type the info command as soon as it boots, everything is in the proper root directory. Make sure you're not sending quotation marks. I would re-download the ISO ZIP, I just updated it to add more cards. If it still doesn't work, send me the output of the command "dir" (with no quotations)

 

[fohdeesha]

Hi There,
Just wanted to say "thank you" for you guides to flashing the H710 mini. I did run into a problem with my attempt and am not sure if this is the forum to ask you about it. I apologize if I am out of line.

Running a Dell R720, with the H710p mini D1 variant. Ran the dos iso and wiped the card fine. However - even trying to launch the Linux iso from the Lifecycle Controller of the 720 I cannot get the Linux iso to boot. Each time I try I get a fatal error and the 720 simply reboots after a fatal error message.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I know that the method that you put together works as I have friends who have gone that route with success,

Thank You all for the forums - much good stuff here. - PMc

I would re-download the ZIP and check that the MD5 matches and your DL is not corrupt, the linux ISO is just plain unmodified debian. The only other time I saw a user (on STH) have the server reset when trying to boot it ended up having memory issues. I would run memtest for a little bit and/or try booting vanilla debian. You can also try burning the ISo to a flash drive and booting off that, instead of idrac virtual media

 

[petermc60]

I would re-download the ZIP and check that the MD5 matches and your DL is not corrupt, the linux ISO is just plain unmodified debian. The only other time I saw a user (on STH) have the server reset when trying to boot it ended up having memory issues. I would run memtest for a little bit and/or try booting vanilla debian. You can also try burning the ISo to a flash drive and booting off that, instead of idrac virtual media

Thank you Fohdeesha - ended up upgrading the firmware on the 720 and booted to a flash drive as suggested. So here was the quirk: It would absolute;y not install anything from the front USBs, but everything worked flawlessly when i switched to the rear ports. And yes, all USB ports are enabled .. go figure. More time in my life that either Dell or MS owes me back :)

 

[ere109]

Thanks for posting this. I just inherited an H710 today.
I do have one question: the guides say not to run this flash on a system with any other HBA. My motherboard has a built in LSI 2308. Can i proceed, should I disable that controller, or do I need to find another system to do the flash?

 

[fohdeesha]

Thanks for posting this. I just inherited an H710 today.
I do have one question: the guides say not to run this flash on a system with any other HBA. My motherboard has a built in LSI 2308. Can i proceed, should I disable that controller, or do I need to find another system to do the flash?

sorry for the delay, I don't get notifications here for some reason. Indeed you should disable the controller in bios if it lets you, so the automated scripts don't try and flash it instead (in DOS in the "info" step, make sure the output from the info command does NOT say 2308)

 

[Ericloewe]

If this belongs better in a different section please let me know, my first time back since the forum has been revamped

If you agree, we can link to this in the Resources section. There's a few LSI HBA resources there already.

 

[fohdeesha]

If you agree, we can link to this in the Resources section. There's a few LSI HBA resources there already.

sure! sounds like a good idea to me

 

[Ericloewe]

There we go, I've converted this into a Resource. This thread is now the discussion thread for the Resource. The resource is assigned to you, @fohdeesha, so you should have full control. If you need help with anything, just ping me.

It turns out that I have a Dell R710 and an R720 at work that will benefit from this guide in the near future (in addition to one or two R630s ordered with HBA330s and delivered with H330s). Thanks for putting this together!

 

[ere109]

A few update notes for all: I have a SuperMicro X9 board, and couldn't get the Debian Live image to fully boot - attempt after attempt. The FreeDOS section of the instructions worked great, but Debian halted, every time, after Intel Management Engine (IMEI) failed to load. I did a bunch of research, and discovered that SM had a ~bad~ IMEI implementation in the X9 boards - and it's not upgradeable.
However, after allowing the Debian image to hang for about ten minutes at the failed IMEI, out of curiousity I hit "Enter" and it took me to a command prompt. From there, I used the manual commands listed in the Forum post, because MPTSAS hadn't loaded during boot.

 

[snowdemon]

I just flashed my H310 mini in a Dell R620. Followed the guide and also flashed with both BIOS and UEFI since my boot drive is off of the controller. I'm pretty sure I installed Server 2019 in UEFI, but when I try to boot off the H310 via the UEFI boot menu the Windows Boot Manager is greyed out. I tried booting via BIOS which detects my C: drive but it blue screens with inaccessible boot drive, which leads me to believe I had it installed via UEFI (which is what I prefer). I went back into the Linux live and flashed again the UEFI bootloader, but it's still greyed out. Any Ideas?

 

[HoneyBadger]

Any Ideas?

Shot in the dark here - but when you reflashed the controller from "Dell PERC H310" to "LSI 9211-8i" perhaps the Dell UEFI firmware is hunting for it by PCI vendor/device ID and can't find anything because it's looking for a PCIe device that isn't there any longer?

See if you can manually add it from the "Add Boot Option" and plug in "EFI\Boot\BOOTX64.EFI" as a path; not sure what EFI filesystem it'll be under but it should be browseable, or you can pop an EFI shell and look interactively. If not, boot from your Server 2019 install and see if you can do an "automatic troubleshooting" or "repair boot" or similar.

 

[snowdemon]

Shot in the dark here - but when you reflashed the controller from "Dell PERC H310" to "LSI 9211-8i" perhaps the Dell UEFI firmware is hunting for it by PCI vendor/device ID and can't find anything because it's looking for a PCIe device that isn't there any longer?

See if you can manually add it from the "Add Boot Option" and plug in "EFI\Boot\BOOTX64.EFI" as a path; not sure what EFI filesystem it'll be under but it should be browseable, or you can pop an EFI shell and look interactively. If not, boot from your Server 2019 install and see if you can do an "automatic troubleshooting" or "repair boot" or similar.

Thanks for the ideas, unfortunately nothing worked. I couldn't even repair with the install disk. I ended up just reinstalling Server 2019 and Hyper-V and adding back into the cluster. Everything seems to be working fine, and disks finally show as SAS in storage spaces instead of RAID. Got one more to do, I imagine I'll be reinstalling Windows on it too.

 

[Xan]

Trying to follow the guide but the info command is not working when I boot to FreeDOS. Getting a "Bad command or filename - "info" when I enter it in C:\

I had this errors too with X9DR3-F Supermicro MB. I reflashed USB with Rufus again in ISO and then again in DD mode. Changed USB port and it worked as in the link.