ASUS P9A-I/C2550/SAS/4L

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metajames

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Jul 15, 2014
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Thanks for trying Patrick. Unfortunately I think I'm gonna have to swap this board out for a supermicro then.
 

Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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I have a feeling it is a BIOS setting. The other thing I want to try is using a ESXi boot disk from another machine on this one. I think I did that successfully on another Bay Trail platform a long time ago.
 

metajames

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Jul 15, 2014
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Yeah, I went through the BIOS several times and tried various combinations of legacy boot modes, different boot media, turning off features etc and still no success. Hope you have better luck than I did... I did email ASUS support about it and their troubleshooting loop is equally frustrating. Let us know if you find a solution, I'd love to make this board work it has so much potential.
 

MiniKnight

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Mar 30, 2012
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Are those controllers even on the ESXi 5.5 HCL? I know VMware is not great on hardware support which is why we all use LSI.

Metajames - the Supermicro LSI one is not mini ITX. It is a custom form factor.
 

metajames

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Jul 15, 2014
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miniknight, My initial goal was to run freenas on bare metal. Since I have a spare sandybridge i3 collecting dust I'm going to just use that with a X9 supermicro board for now. Would love to get the low power and low thermal load benefits of the atom though. This little board has so much potential!
 

MiniKnight

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Mar 30, 2012
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I'd bet this little board gets better in the next month or two as people start using and reporting bugs like this.

I was thinking of using for a ZoL machine. I saw the Napp-it thread and that looks like a good freenas alternative and linux I feel has better support than freebsd
 

Kristian

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Jun 1, 2013
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Has somebody tried to update the bios?

When using the Asus EzFlash Utility I get an error message saying: "Model Name doesn't match!" (see attached screenshot) (What is also strange is that it is displaying on the left side that the current platform is a C2750. I am just having the C2550 model)

Edit 1: Bupdater is also not working.

Edit 2: BTW: Seems to me the onboard marvell controllers have no support for any kind of build in raid. Or am I just to stupid finding that option?

Edit 3: Next problem encountered: Hibernate is not working. Neither when setting the acpi settings to automatic configuration, nor when trying to set the acpi settings manually, because all settings are kind of greyed out (see attached screenshot #2)

Any help will be greatly appreciated
 

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zetlali

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Jul 28, 2014
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Wait... so the Marvell controller doesn't support raid and the board doesn't appear to work with ESXi? That basically eliminates both use cases for me.

edit: Found this comment on a Newegg review for the Asrock with the same controller:

Since it wasn't intuitive to find, if you enable "Boot" but not "UEFI boot" on the 2-port Marvel controller, you'll get a new option during bootup to hit "ctrl-M" to get into the RAID config (after having switched said Marvel controller mode into RAID as well)
 
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Patrick

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Just as a thought, I would highly recommend using some sort of software RAID over Marvell RAID.

Also when you are trying to update the BIOS what do you have set for:
IntelRCSetup -> Relax Security Configuration ?
 

Kristian

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Jun 1, 2013
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@zetlali: I will try that tonight and give you feedback. I don't think I have seen a "Boot" / "UEFI Boot" option but I will have a close look
@Patrick: I tried both options (starting with enabled) - no luck
 

MiniKnight

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Mar 30, 2012
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Hey two questions for you @Kristian
Why update BIOS? Is something else broken?
Why try Marvell RAID? Even software RAID passthrough via iSCSI to a hypervisor would be better. let's say you get RAID setup. What utility will be used to manage?

I thought this is either a ZoL, xpenology, mdadm + KVM (lightweight VM) server board. The processor and limited RAM make it a super storage server and maybe you could run something else like a PXE + TFTP server on it in a KVM VM.
 

Kristian

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Jun 1, 2013
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Hey @MiniKnight

I tried to update the BIOS because of the not working hibernate feature.

As I bought this board to replace the mainbard in my windows 2012r2 storage server.
The storage server is using a software called lightsout that is essentially putting the server to standby / hibernate mode as soon as none of my clients is switched on.

Marvell RAID is not something I would really make use of. It was just playing arround with the board.

So if I can't make this board go into hibernate state I have to find another os to make use of this board.
But I would really like this board to run windows for the moment (because of smb3 multichannel mode and because all the 10GB NICs I have are in need of 8x electric)

xpenology would be fine, FreeNAS would be okay (but is not booting),

Newbie that I am: ZoL, mdadm, pxe + tftp are abreviations that I never even heard of (so probably that is not the right thing for me)

@zetlali
I have not found anything about "Boot" / "UEFI Boot". When pressing CRTL + M attached you find the screenshots from the Marvell controlle BIOS
 

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MiniKnight

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Mar 30, 2012
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To me that looks like a HBA BIOS not a RAID adapter. Better for this kind of board.

I can see why you'd want that. ZoL = ZFS on Linux. I see your point.
 

fastmachine

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Mar 5, 2014
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I have been waiting to pull the trigger on this board. Does it seem like it would work for ZFS on Linux without virtualization? I need to build a machine soon and I agree (or maybe just home) that support will come in the next month or two for virtualized support.

(Sorry if I miss read a post above and this is already answered.)
 

Kristian

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Jun 1, 2013
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@reardonia: no luck.
I wrote a support request to Asus. While they are promising to answer within 48h by now 96h have passed and no word from them yet.
 

reardonia

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Aug 2, 2014
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@reardonia: no luck.
I wrote a support request to Asus. While they are promising to answer within 48h by now 96h have passed and no word from them yet.
I got a response from Asus this morning telling me to use EZFlash..doh.

The tech rep seemed to not understand that the update is unflashable. Sigh.
 

crockers

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Aug 3, 2014
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I got a response from Asus this morning telling me to use EZFlash..doh.

The tech rep seemed to not understand that the update is unflashable. Sigh.
First time poster here. I've browsed this forum over the years and finally jumped in to SFF home servers with this motherboard... not a good start I guess!

I also opened a case on the BIOS update issue. So far ASUS support's response was to try renaming the BIOS filename to "P9A-I.CAP"... no success. I also sent them screenshots of the error in both BUPDATER and EZFlash similar to Kristian's. I do wonder if there's a way to edit the BIOS itself (like FD44Editor) or force the update.