SOLVED nForce 680i board will not boot with HP H220 (LSI 9207-8i) HBA

TechTrash Rigs

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I just wanted to document in case someone else tries to use an HP H220 with nForce 680i board. After cross flashing HP H220 to LSI 9207-8i, the card would not detect any drives and would hang on a blank screen after the HBA finished its boot. I could not access motherboard BIOS or boot to USB. I had similar issues with trying to boot off USB drives, which I just installed FreeNAS to internal HDD.

After removing the card several times to check BIOS settings, I came across this post. I removed boot services. Now the system will boot.
 
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TechTrash Rigs

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Chris Moore

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Chris Moore

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nForce 680i board
The problem with your setup was probably that the board you are using is not fully compatible with using a SAS controller. This is a very VERY old socket 775 system board that uses DDR2 memory on a "front side bus" architecture. The specs page:
https://www.nvidia.com/object/designed_by_nvidia_680i_sli.html
says it uses and NVIDIA network interface, so you may yet run into other problems with making this work or you may not get good performance with that network interface.
I would suggest that you should look into our hardware guides on the forum and potentially select newer hardware that is known to be compatible with FreeNAS and the hardware that is typically used with FreeNAS.

Hardware Recommendations by @cyberjock - from 26 Aug 2014 - and still valid
https://forums.freenas.org/threads/hardware-recommendations-read-this-first.23069/

Hardware Recommendations Guide Rev. 1e) 2017-05-06
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/hardware-recommendations-guide.12/

FreeNAS® Quick Hardware Guide
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/freenas®-quick-hardware-guide.7/

Why not to use RAID-5 or RAIDz1
https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/

Terminology and Abbreviations Primer
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/terminology-and-abbreviations-primer.28174/

Slideshow explaining VDev, zpool, ZIL and L2ARC
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ning-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/

Building, Burn-In, and Testing your FreeNAS system
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/building-burn-in-and-testing-your-freenas-system.38/

Github repository for FreeNAS scripts, including disk burnin
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...for-freenas-scripts-including-disk-burnin.28/
 
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