Hello and how easy is it to kill a Dell Perc H200?

[Biffa]

Hi All,

Previously played around with VMs and various flavours of pre built NAS, Thecus, Synology & QNAP. My current setup is a simple one with Supermicro tower sitting in the garage with 4x seagate 16tb x16 Exos in Raid 10. Running Hyper-V, had been running ESXi previously but change of server from HP ML350P meant I switched over. Usual stuff on it, Plex, Home Automation, recursive DNS, gameservers etc.

Have recently been given a box of 6TB drives (30+) which were in a netapp previously, I have converted them all to 512 bytes and checked all the drives. Keeping Toshiba, HGST and Seagate only. Since I had multiples of these and none of them showed anything other than 100% on Crystal disk. So I know all the drives are good and are spinning up ok in the HP Z840 I used to conver them.

Thought Truenas would be a useful way to utilise some of the drives as a disk to disk back up for the Supermicro, using bits and pieces I have around the house. Starting point only and may see how it all works out.

Setup as follows:

Gigabyte GA-Z77-DS3H

• i7-3770K
• Boot Drive 128GB SK Hynix mSata
• 32GB (4x8GB Corsair Vengeance LP)
• 6TB SAS tried with Toshiba MGO4SCA60EE & other drives too just in case.
• Dell Perc H200 with SFF-8087 to four SFF-8482 (with SATA power)
• 700W PSU in an ancient but very solid Coolermaster Praetorian case.

Spent some time getting the adapter into IT mode, took a few goes but that bit seemed to work ok, intially had an issue with the disks not starting in the chassis, been messing around with it and have realised they were not starting due to the 3.3v on pin 3 that is resolved and the disks now start.

Now having gone from flashing adapter into IT mode and seeing no disks, I now have disks starting but cannot see my adapter.

From within the Truenas Shell, sas2flash -c 0 -list returns:

Adapter Selected is a LSI SAS: SAS2008(B2)

Controller Number : 0
Controller : SAS2008(B2)
PCI Address : 00:05:00:00
SAS Address : 5b82a72-0-ce7f-4f00
NVDATA Version (Default) : 14.01.00.08
NVDATA Version (Persistent) : 14.01.00.08
Firmware Product ID : 0x2213 (IT)
Firmware Version : 20.00.07.00
NVDATA Vendor : LSI
NVDATA Product ID : SAS9211-8i
BIOS Version : N/A
UEFI BSD Version : N/A
FCODE Version : N/A
Board Name : 6Gbps SAS HBA
Board Assembly : N/A
Board Tracer Number : N/A

However that was yesterday and looking at it today I am now getting this:

root@truenas[~]# sas2flash -listall
LSI Corporation SAS2 Flash Utility
Version 16.00.00.00 (2013.03.01)
Copyright (c) 2008-2013 LSI Corporation. All rights reserved

No LSI SAS adapters found! Limited Command Set Available!
ERROR: Command Not allowed without an adapter!
ERROR: Couldn't Create Command -listall
Exiting Program.

Originally I thought the disk issue was PCIe related and swapped slots, my guess is I have somehow killed my card in the process, 1st time for everything I suppose!

Anything I can do here other than order another card?

• Have removed and re-sited the card in both PCIe (x16) slots
• Have reset BIOS to Defaults and Optimised defaults.
• Have tried to boot with and without the SFF-8087 attached.

No change as a result of any of the above would welcome any thoughts here or suggestions to try?

Thanks in advance.

Biffa

 

[Biffa]

Tried in another machine and new card on order :(

 

[samarium]

I've recently had success resuscitating an old Fujitsu 2008 HBA that I had bricked years ago. Recently found lsirec and lsiutil software on github and was able to use lsirec and lsiutil to load firmware. After disabling IOMMU/VT-x in BIOS, no further rebooted were required, and was able to recover using linux, could even power on reset the card using lsirec, and event load firmware into the card to run as opposed to flashing the firmware and then resetting the card. Both seem to work. Had to get the SBR correct of course.

GitHub - marcan/lsirec: LSI SAS2008/SAS2108 low-level recovery tool for Linux

LSI SAS2008/SAS2108 low-level recovery tool for Linux - marcan/lsirec

github.com

meta-xa-stm/recipes-support/lsiutil at master · exactassembly/meta-xa-stm

Yocto layer for LSI SAS2 and SAS3 SCSI Target Mode - exactassembly/meta-xa-stm

github.com

 

[Biffa]

I've recently had success resuscitating an old Fujitsu 2008 HBA that I had bricked years ago. Recently found lsirec and lsiutil software on github and was able to use lsirec and lsiutil to load firmware. After disabling IOMMU/VT-x in BIOS, no further rebooted were required, and was able to recover using linux, could even power on reset the card using lsirec, and event load firmware into the card to run as opposed to flashing the firmware and then resetting the card. Both seem to work. Had to get the SBR correct of course.

GitHub - marcan/lsirec: LSI SAS2008/SAS2108 low-level recovery tool for Linux

LSI SAS2008/SAS2108 low-level recovery tool for Linux - marcan/lsirec

github.com

meta-xa-stm/recipes-support/lsiutil at master · exactassembly/meta-xa-stm

Yocto layer for LSI SAS2 and SAS3 SCSI Target Mode - exactassembly/meta-xa-stm

github.com

Thanks for that I will give that a look over, have time on my hands at the moment so more projects keep out of the pub. However breaking a card to create one was not in the plan.

Been lurking here for a while and there is just so much to take on board, my prospective setup is really a test only. Having read up here I will likely be swapping out the motherboard for an Asus X99 (once i can free it up), which handily has 4 PCIe 16 slots, can accomodate a Xeon (which I have a few around) an ECC ram (which likewise I have lots of).

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

Hello and how easy is it to kill a Dell Perc H200?

I have 20,000 volts that says, "It's really easy."

But in all seriousness, LSI has toolsets (lsiutil) for inspection and uploading an updated BIOS and working settings. They're good cards.

 

[Biffa]

I have 20,000 volts that says, "It's really easy."

But in all seriousness, LSI has toolsets (lsiutil) for inspection and uploading an updated BIOS and working settings. They're good cards.

Yes, I think you can deliver 30k+ with some carpet and a shuffling gait...

Thanks all for the pointers, have stuck Ubuntu on a Dell T110 ii with the card in it and will tinker with that to see if it can be resurrected.

I fear however that it may be resting after a long squawk!

 

[samarium]

I haven't poked a Perc, however have flashed IBM M1015, and Fujitsu D2607. IBM was too long ago to remember details. 2607 I needed the flash the appropriate SBR as I have done too good a job long ago bricking it. Found D2607 A11 and A21 SBR on the web, maybe even here, certainly looked at enough web pages. Needed the correct SBR to get both 8087 ports working. Interestingly I have an A11 card, but it needed toe A21 SBR to use both ports. There is lots of unknown data in the SBR however. Loading SBR is cmoparitively easy with lsirec/lsiutil under linux, certainly no where the maze of irritating constraints with sasflash etc and uefi vs dos and boot usbs, and having to reboot almost every time or even moving between legacy motherboard and uefi motherboard.

 

[Biffa]

Installed Ubunutu and sorted out lsirec etc. the card is not even showing up in lspci so think it is an ex-perc controller now and lost cause at this point.

Thanks for the pointers, but will await the replacement now rather than sinking more time into this one.

 

[samarium]

Yes, I was able to see my card in lspci, even though it didn't have an SBR or FW or BIOS. If you can't see on the PCI bus then difficult for lsirec to poke it's registers.

 

[Biffa]

Indeed, which leads me to the assumption that it is truly an ex-hba