deionmann

There's a lovely option these days with enterprise level motherboards from Asus. The illusive PIKE Slot. I say illusive because there's not much information out there about them. Or How to flash them should you need to. Basically it's a proprietary pcie slot that when populated allows access to 8 extra SATA3/SAS2 ports on the motherboard. It's basically the same thing as an AOC-MV8 or M1015 but without taking up a normally placed PCIE slot on the mobo, pretty sweet IMHO. Any way, these motherboards take several different flavors of the PIKE card, however for us unRAID users, we'll focus on the PIKE2008 because this comes with a rebranded version of LSI SAS2008 9220-8i that natively passes through to unRAID.... Until you plug in another LSI SAS2008 card... Then there's this lovely bug that makes this card unstable and you'll have to flash new firmware in order to ever see your drives again. So if you're ever as unlucky as me, (For referance I found this with a PIKE 2008 & M1015 on the Asus P8B-E 4/L Motherboard) Here's the walkthrough. 1. Get the SAS2008 files here -> http://forums.laptopvideo2go.com/topic/29059-lsi-92xx-firmware-files/ 2. Download the 9211-8I firmware files from LSI -> http://www.avagotech.com/cs/Satellite?c=Page&childpagename=AVG2%2FAVG2_Layout&cid=1211128364570&d=Touch&locale=avg_en&pagename=AVG2_Wrapper 3. Head over to here -> https://svn.code.sf.net/p/edk2/code/...FullShell/X64/ and download that file, rename it to shellx64.efi 4. Create a usb, dos bootable, I would recommend using Rufus (do a google search) 5. Throw the SAS2008 files on the usb, replacing the firmware (9211it.bin) and bios (mptsas2.rom) you grabbed from LSI (I've tested and confirmed that P15, P16 & P19 all work with unraid 6.1 & 6.19) then make a subfolder /boot/eufi/ and place shellx64.efi inside the folder tree. 6. Write down the 16 digit sas adress on the back of the PIKE card 7. Reinstall PIKE card, Remove all drives, other adapters and boot into the usb 8. Backup the current firmware from the card megarec -writesbr 0 pike2008.sbr 9. Clear the card megarec -writesbr 0 sbrempty.bin megarec -cleanflash 0 10. Reboot server (ctrl+alt+delete) and enter the motherboard bios, go to the exit tab and choose 'Launch EFI Shell from filesystem device' This will launch the shellx64.efi that you provided on the usb. 11. Navigate to the root of the usb by typing Fs0: 12. Write the new firmware/bios to the card. sas2flash -o -f 2118it.bin -b mptsas2.rom You have an option to skip the part of the code (-b mptsas2.rom) in order to speed up boot times, however if your using more than one HBA I would strongly encourage you to keep it. 13. Readdress the card sas2flash -o sasadd xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx X's being the SAS adress from the back of your card. Reboot and enjoy! -- side note, if you chose to keep the mptsas2 bios, and have another SAS2008 HBA, now would be a good time to go into the bios and set the boot order of the cards. My server would only load one card at random until I did. --