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simkard

7 Posts

21857

August 5th, 2010 14:00

PE T110 with a SAS RAID Controller SuperMicro AOC-USASLP-S8iR ... hangs at bios post after memory check ?!

Hi all !

This is my first post so i'll introduce myself first ...

I'm a french networks & systems engineer/consultant.

For business purposes, i own a PowerEdge T110 that runs VmWare ESX v4.0 Update 2.

As i was running a  SAS3442e on my T110, the performances was very poor so i made some choices about a new SAS RAID Controller ... and i ended buying a SuperMicro AOC-USASLP-S8iR from ebay USA.

The problem i'm facing is that when i put the card in whatever slots of the mainboard and turn the server on, when it finishes the memory check, it hangs systematicaly like the card would not initialize itself ... strange ...

I investigated the problem and tried to insert the card in another computer which is my desktop one (motherboard TYAN i5000PX-S5380) ... SURPRISE !!! it works ...

I could see that the bios is an Adaptec v5.2.0 and i immediately thought if i could rebrand the card like what i did on my HP Software RAID SAS Controller to get RAID5 functionnality (i had to flash BIOS and FIRMWARE which are 2 seperated things ... only the 3442e is able to deal with RAID5 by the way). The Adaptec card which seems to be the same is the 5405 but after downloading the firmware files, i couldn't flash the bios of the card because the software was reading the subsystem device and vendor IDs ...

So i tried to contact SuperMicro technical support by mail, they answered very quickly, here was our exchanges :

Me

Hi,
 
I'm facing a problem with a Dell PowerEdge T110 server full up-to-date (BMC v1.5 and BIOS v1.3.4) and a SuperMicro AOC-USASLP-S8iR ...
 
When i power on the server, it seems that the card, physically, is lighting its leds fine, but when the BIOS post come to the point of initializing the card, it seems that the system hangs ...
 
I tried to disable integrated SATA RAID / SATA AHCI / SATA ATA, removing the other SAS RAID CARD (LSI 1068e), nothing works.
 
I just don't understand why this card is acting so weird ?!
 
Could it be a BIOS problem on the card itself ?
I searched around our website but i couldn't find a firmware update.
 
I ended adding the card in another system because i thought it was dead but when i switched on my desktop computer (motherboard TYAN i5000PX-S5380), the bios of the card initialized fine and i could get in the RAID BIOS ... which is an ADAPTEC ... so i made some deductions ...
 
As the BIOS of this card is an ADAPTEC, could i try to flash it with a RAID BIOS coming from adaptec (as you don't provide one) for having the card working on my Dell PowerEdge T110 Server ... ?!
 
It seems that this SuperMicro AOC-USASLP-S8iR is quite the same than the Adaptec 5405 as these both include : Intel IOP348 processor, 256 Mb, but the Adaptec one has only 4 ports ...
 
I don't know what to do about this problem so before doing a flash that could brick the card, i prefer asking you for a good solution.

SuperMicro Technical Support

May problem relate to Mainboard option rom size problem.  May you can disable some BIOS LAN option rom or select add on card first for option.

After this answer, i tried to disable every boot rom that was loading during post (PXE, other RAID SAS Card, SATA AHCI, etc ...) and i ended with the card still hanging at bios post ... i even tried to change some IRQ assigned in bios for some peripherals ! nothing did the trick !

The server BIOS and BMC firmwares are up-to-date (BIOS v1.3.4 and BMC v1.5).

 

So i'm here to ask if someone already faced this same problem and got some luck with it ?

 

Thanks !

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