Help Needed: Can't boot from USB with all drives installed

[Fuganater]

Hi all,

I've been using FreeNAS at my house for a few years now but I'm having issues with a new build. I'm building a server at my brother's house as an offsite backup and for him to use as a media server and it is giving me odd boot issues. It is old hardware but should still work

Supermicro X8DT6
2x Xeon X5675
64GB RAM
17x 2TB WD Red and SE drives
800W PSU
NORCO RPC-4224 Chassis
3x LSI 9211 HBA flashed to v20 IT Firmware (confirmed via the Ctrl+C config screen)
These use 6x SFF-8087 cables to control all 24 drives

So the issue.
When all 17 drives are installed, the server will not boot. It tells me to insert a proper boot device and try again. If I pull out some drives from the 2nd HBA card, it can boot.

Is this a cable, card or hard drive issue?

I'm working on this by swapping some things around but looking to see if anyone has seen this before.

 

[Fuganater]

So it seems that it will only boot with 8 drives in. If drives are connected to HBA 2 or 3, it won't boot.

I've swapped cables around so they are all good. I'm going to move the HBAs around now and see if that does anything.

 

[melloa]

How are your LSI flashed? Do they have the boot ROM? My 4U runs with four of them and boots from a ssd connected to the MB Sata port without any issues.

Did you search the forum for this problem? I found this post (and six more pages, with the search not boot lsi 9211).

 

[Fuganater]

How are your LSI flashed? Do they have the boot ROM? My 4U runs with four of them and boots from a ssd connected to the MB Sata port without any issues.

Did you search the forum for this problem? I found this post (and six more pages, with the search not boot lsi 9211).

The issue ended up being the boot options in the cards. I have 6 of these in my other 2 servers and I never had to mess with that option. Once I disabled it, the server booted without issue and I could see all 17x HDDs.

 

[melloa]

The issue ended up being the boot options in the cards.

Hence the question if you had the boot ROM on your cards :)

Glad you figured it out. Please mark the post resolved.