Hi,

I have the following setup:

• DELL R410 Server
• VessRAID 1830s External RAID, direct attached through SAS
• a LSI SAS 9200-8e controller card to connect the RAID through an FF-8808 connector

The problem is:

we where going to install VMWare ESXi on this mashine, and the installation is already done sinve quite some time. The problem is, that we cannot boot from the RAID. Somehow the BIOS does not recognise the LSI Card. We made already all the firmwares and BIOSes up-to-date without any success. The technology used is named BIOS Boot Specification. Somehow this does not work with the R410. The partitions from the LSI Controller do not appear in the BIOS and neither in the boot menu. The Controller itself throws these warnings:

Preferred boot device is missing, reconfiguration is suggested!

And in the BIOS Manual they say:

"Preferred boot device is missing, reconfiguration is suggested!" appears
if the user has selected a preferred or alternate boot device and is not
detected during BIOS initialization.

And later on I get:

MPT boot ROM, no supported device found

Now I have 1 easy solution: get 2 new harddisks and setup another RAID1 inside the server. I don't wanna do this. I would like to have all on my external RAID.

So another solution would be to boot to grub on an usb stick and somehow chainload the VMWare bootloader. I have no clue whether this is possible.

Or someone tells me what I am doing wrong. (I would prefer this one.)