So, here we go. I purchased a used LSI 9211-8i to use in my NAS. I installed the card, attached a few drives, booted the system, and everything looked OK. I'm using FreeNAS and there was a warning saying that my card's firmware and BIOS didn't like each other (I can't remember the exact wording). So, I reboot and go into the card settings and see what I have…
So, I check LSI's web page and sure enough I'm way behind on both BIOS and Firmware versions. I look up a handful of tutorials, I read the LSI flash reference guide, I make a bootable FreeDOS USB drive, copy the files over I need and go to town. I start with verifying what I have with the following…
sas2flsh -list
gave me this which matched what I saw before in the controller settings/configuration…
So… here I go. First erase the card storage
sas2flsh -o -e 6
then flash the new BIOS and Firmware
sas2flsh -o -f 2118it.bin -b mptsas2.rom
then re-check/validate what happened (because each step above was giving confirmations of success)
sas2flsh -list
which appeared to go swimingly and gave me this…
Everything looks good, so I reboot, everything is looking fine, I enter into the controller configuration and as expected I get this….
I'm happy, everything looks fine. So, I exit and reboot, things are looking fine… and then BAM! The system hangs. The motherboard board makes it through POST just like before, the card initializes just like before, but then when everything should switch over to the system booting from something… nothing happens. It just goes to a black screen. If on POST I hit delete to enter BIOS, it acknowledges that I want to enter BIOS, but never does… just the blank/black screen. Same if I hit F8 to ask for the boot menu options… blank/black screen. I let it go for a while to see if it was waiting for something (I can't imagine what) but it just sits there. I pulled the LSI card from the system and then I can boot just fine. Put it back in, and it's back to blank/black screen after the LSI card initialization finishes. I tried enabling/disabling the boot support on the LSI card in all it's options… nothing. I considered flashing it back to an older firmware… but I can't get it to boot to anything much less the USB that I used to flash in the first place. I even disconnected the drives from it (just because I couldn't think of anything else to try) and that didn't change anything either.
As for the rest of the system, it's a bit on the old side (it is for running FreeNAS after all)… so, hold your breath for a second…
- ASUS P5N-D motherboard – updated to latest BIOS 1401 (2010/07/01)
- Intel E7500
- 8GB RAM
I know… not a true server… not using ECC RAM… blah, blah, blah… Focus on the problem… BLACK/BLANK screen after LSI card initialization. 😉
Any help/suggestions/thoughts to resolve this would be most welcomed and I thank everyone in advance if for no other reason than reading through all of the above.
Best Answer
I had a no boot issue that was frustrating me for months. Sometimes system would boot then eventually crash. Sometimes it would not even make it past POST. It also did not detect all my installed RAM. One stick was missing. The fix was to put some tape over the B5 and B6 pins (component side). After I did this the system booted right up. Been running two days with no problems and transferring lots of files. I hope your problem is this simple too.