NAS hangs on boot with m1015 installed

[goudviske]

Hi,

Wanted to expand storage capacity on my home NAS, and due to a lack of available sata ports on the motherboard (ASUS M3A76-CM), I got me an IBM m1015 SAS addon card.

Flashed the card to LSI 2008 without issues, card detects drives and stuff.

But when the card is inserted into my NAS box, the NAS hangs on booting, last thing it shows is "Checking NVRAM", if I pop the card out, it boots as normal.

Ive tried a bunch of things, such as:
- resetting BIOS to defaults
- disabling a bunch of things in the BIOS (audio, lan, ports)
- disabling ECC, booting with only 1 bar of memory
- booting with no HDDs
- flashing bios to latest version

But none of these seem to work or have any effect on booting.

Any ideas on what could be causing the issue?
For the record, the PC does not complete its boot sequence, so it has nothing to do with NAS4Free itself

[b0ssman]

your bios does not like the bios of the m1015.

reflash the m1015 in a different machine
but in the last step instead of
sas2flsh.exe -l Flashlog.txt -o -f 2118ir.bin -b mptsas2.rom
do
sas2flsh.exe -l Flashlog.txt -o -f 2118ir.bin

this mean you will not flash the it bios but only the firmware.

you wont be able to boot of a hd connected to the card but the card will work in nas4free.
(plus your pc will boot faster because the bios does not need to be loaded)

[goudviske]

Thank you,
will give it a try tonight
will update with results

EDIT:
Flashed last night with:
sas2flsh -o -f 2118it.bin (not adding the -b xxxx)
sas2flsh -o -sasadd 500605bxxxxxxxxx (x= numbers for SAS address)

I noticed you stated to flash into ir mode, I'm thinking this is a typo, but if it isn't please do tell
Haven't tested the card yet, I will do that tonight, had some issues with flashing from a PC with UEFI bios, but I got it to work in the end

[goudviske]

Update:

Flashed controller as stated above (it mode)
Still locks up on "checking nvram"

I do get there faster, because there is no more LSI info / config displayed, I suppose thats due to the -b config missing

Any other thoughts or ideas?

[b0ssman]

sorry I should have explained it in more detail
yes the ir was a typo, i copied it from a website and copied the wrong one.
http://www.servethehome.com/ibm-serveraid-m1015-part-4/

you will need to wipe the lsi bios first.
with
Megarec -cleanflash 0

you just updated the firmware but left the bios untouched.

[goudviske]

Hi,

I did clean the LSI bios first, with commands:

megarec -writesbr 0 empty.bin
megarec -cleanflash 0

But happy to give it another go if you think it may help

[b0ssman]

hmm thats strange without the mptsas2.rom there should be nothing that gets loaded during boot.

[b0ssman]

the only other thing i can think of is some board do not like it if you put something other than a grafics card into the main 16x pcie slot

[goudviske]

that'd be bad
suppose I need a new mainboard, and thus new cpu and memory (which i just upgraded)

[Lee Sharp]

I have seen this a LOT in Dell systems where there is a x2 and a x16, and you can only use a video card in the x16.

[goudviske]

No luck so far in getting it to work with the IBM
Tried installing an intel 2port NIC on pci-e, and it seems to work fine, boots up with no issues, all good

hope i dont have to get a new mobo, coz that d mean new ram and cpu aswel, and if you want ECC nowadays, these things dont come cheap anymore

[Lee Sharp]

I have used a lot of boards in the past, and I am liking SuperMicro more and more each day. I used to think they were pricy for what you got, but as other things have gone up, the price has become more affordable.