SOLVED Issue getting LSI 9211-8i card to be recognized on TrueNAS

[Bxscig]

Hi, I am new to all this but have read a lot of threads and couldn’t find much that I could use to solve this issue on this forum.

I am new to TrueNAS and just installed a system with an old PC at the moment and wanted to add more SATA ports. Read that getting a HBA is best compared to the PCI to SATA card so I got one that was supposedly flashed to IT mode already. Review seem to show that if they normally do so it should be but when I installed it onto all the various PCI slots, I couldn’t get it detected.

Using a Gigabyte B560 motherboard with 32GB of RAM.

Tried to run sas2flash and couldn’t get it to see it. Tried a few different other things but couldn’t see it.

 

[Alecmascot]

Is there a bios setting to enable option roms for each of the PCI slots ?

 

[Redcoat]

Welcome to the forums!

Sorry you're having trouble. Flashed or not, HBA card should be picked up and initialized during boot. I suggest you try it in another machine - if still a no-show, likely it's bad and needs to go back to the vendor. Many of us here have had very good experience with The Art of Server - look for his ebay store - should you decide you need a fresh supplier.

 

[Bxscig]

I checked the BIOs yesterday and didn’t find it but will check again. I maybe was looking in the wrong place. Will try shortly

 

[Bxscig]

Is there a bios setting to enable option roms for each of the PCI slots ?

I checked again all the options and I do not see a mention of "ROMS".

 

[Bxscig]

Welcome to the forums!

Sorry you're having trouble. Flashed or not, HBA card should be picked up and initialized during boot. I suggest you try it in another machine - if still a no-show, likely it's bad and needs to go back to the vendor. Many of us here have had very good experience with The Art of Server - look for his ebay store - should you decide you need a fresh supplier.

Ok, so I tried it in another machine and it won't even get to the BIOS screen. At least in the system for TrueNAS, I get past BIOS and it boots into TrueNAS. There was a command I found that someone asked to do dmesg | grep LSI and there was one line in there for the card but running sas2flash, it didnt see anything.

 

[Bxscig]

Would there be compatibility issues with certain motherboards?

 

[Bxscig]

I returned the original one I bought and bought one from Art of Server but this time a 9201-8i versus 9211-8i. Loaded it and still the same symptoms but this time he suggested sas2flash -c 0 -list and it returned nothing although when I did checked dmesg and showed and he said that is what it looks like when detected which was the same as the original card I bought.

Tried sudo sas2flash -c 0 - list and then it showed the details of the card. I suspect the first one worked too but I didn’t know how to confirm very well. I should have just plugged a hard drive in at first and test the original one I bought. I didn’t because I didn’t have any space and needed to order some brackets to be able to mount additional hard drives.

At first thought this was tough use those HBA cards but it was simple and can see why everyone suggests it compared to the PCIE to SATA cards.

Hope this helps someone else down the line