Guide: Flashing H310/H710/H810 Mini & full size to IT Mode

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

amp88

Member
Jul 9, 2020
59
63
18
The iDRAC card/slot was missing or not installed. Checked original Dell spec and it was not listed/included.
You're talking about the iDRAC Remote Access Card (e.g. Dell part numbers 2827M, 81RK6, 02827M, 081RK6) which can be plugged into the board and provides a dedicated RJ45 port for iDRAC access and an SD card slot for various functionality. However, that card itself is just an extension of the iDRAC functionality that's built into the board. Even if your R520 doesn't have the remote access card and an Enterprise license, it still has iDRAC express built into the system board.
 
  • Like
Reactions: fohdeesha

fohdeesha

Kaini Industries
Nov 20, 2016
2,729
3,080
113
33
fohdeesha.com
Just to share my experience with the flashing a Dell R520 with PERC H710 mini.

Follow the guide and wasn't able to setsas (error was No LSI SAS adapters found!). Re-read the entire guide again, and found out that I forgot to turn off CPU virtualization settings. Reverted card firmware with B0REVERT and start all over again, and didn't seem to work. Try again a few times/reboot/cold boot/unseat/reseat card, and suddenly setsas worked... then finished up by flashboot /root/Bootloaders/mptsas2.rom and now FreeBSD boots happily from the H710. Will power cycle it a few times in the follow days to make sure everything works before reinstall FreeBSD fresh again for production to replacing my old NAS.

General advice: retry a few times if you get errors, as these commands appear could be run repeatedly (@fohdeesha to keep me honest) and like others, take a break or overnight and retry. You may eventually get it to work.

Again, like all others before me, I want to give a sincere thanks to @fohdeesha.
here's a question, did you happen to have any disks installed at all/connected to the perc while going through the flashing process?
 

svetlinsem

New Member
Jun 5, 2022
1
0
1
Hello Guys, I have a Dell r620 with 2 two raid controllers H710 B0 Mini and S110. Can I flash H710 B0 Mini with IT? I try to flash with no errors, but after that, I can't open the new controller just reboot the server.
 

fohdeesha

Kaini Industries
Nov 20, 2016
2,729
3,080
113
33
fohdeesha.com
updated the guide, added a dedicated H310 full size guide and appropriate flashing files

I've noticed on newer servers (like 13g dells and newer) debian and most other OS's downright can't initialize the stock megaraid firmware on these H310s (and probably anything else based on this older megaraid firmware), so the H310 guides won't work for these on newer servers. Tested with a plain stock debian install and it can't even see them either, so nothing I can do about it

find an older server to flash them, or perhaps I'll split the H310 guides into two steps like the newer controllers are instead of trying to do all the sbr flashing and everything in one linux step. instead we could first wipe the megaraid mode SBR in freedos, and flash an IT mode SBR instead. then once you're in linux to flash the actual IT firmware it won't matter that linux on newer machines can't init megaraid cards, because it'll no longer be one

edit: confirmed the above method enables it to work even on newer servers, will update the guide in the next few days
 
Last edited:

elalann

New Member
Jul 20, 2022
2
0
1
Hi @fohdeesha
I just registered to thank you for the amazing guide and job you did with this.

I sucessfully flashed my H710 D1 to IT, but it didn't work as I planned to.
There is any guide or documentation you can link me so I can try to flash the LSI IR firmware for my card?

I don't like the stock DELL Perc firmware because it screams about my SSDs not being certified and makes the server a chirstmas tree.

PS: Reading older posts you said something about tacobell donations, I'm not from the US (I only know its a fastfood chain like mcd). How I can donate you?
 

fohdeesha

Kaini Industries
Nov 20, 2016
2,729
3,080
113
33
fohdeesha.com
Hi @fohdeesha
I just registered to thank you for the amazing guide and job you did with this.

I sucessfully flashed my H710 D1 to IT, but it didn't work as I planned to.
There is any guide or documentation you can link me so I can try to flash the LSI IR firmware for my card?

I don't like the stock DELL Perc firmware because it screams about my SSDs not being certified and makes the server a chirstmas tree.

PS: Reading older posts you said something about tacobell donations, I'm not from the US (I only know its a fastfood chain like mcd). How I can donate you?
no clue to be honest, you'd need to generate a new custom SBR with values for IR instead of IT, while maintaining the dell subvendor PCI IDs. As for donations the taco bell thing was mostly a joke, there's a paypal donate button at the top of the guide :p
 

elalann

New Member
Jul 20, 2022
2
0
1
there's a paypal donate button at the top of the guide
Found it. Will send you for some coffees tomorrow.

About the IR thing, forget it. Went to explore new ways, the task of turning off the christmas tree that started with an IT flash (not actually knowing how it could end) and.. well.. it ended ditching ESXi in favor of XCP-ng and doing ZFS-Z2. (This isn't production, of course, two weeks in and still migrating from the VMFS datastore)

Regards,
Alan
 

fohdeesha

Kaini Industries
Nov 20, 2016
2,729
3,080
113
33
fohdeesha.com
Found it. Will send you for some coffees tomorrow.

About the IR thing, forget it. Went to explore new ways, the task of turning off the christmas tree that started with an IT flash (not actually knowing how it could end) and.. well.. it ended ditching ESXi in favor of XCP-ng and doing ZFS-Z2. (This isn't production, of course, two weeks in and still migrating from the VMFS datastore)

Regards,
Alan
good choice re xcp
 
  • Like
Reactions: itronin

betaoux

New Member
Aug 28, 2022
1
0
1
I'm having an issue where the linux image won't boot, just gets stuck on a flashing cursor. I can go into FreeDOS fine and run D1Cross, but I can't boot into linux at all. I've tried restarting multiple times, reverting and redoing the flash, removing other disks from the server but I can't get into it at all. Any help? I have an R420 with the D1 710 mini
I also saw one other post that seemed to be having the same problem I'm having but never found a resolution.
 
Last edited:

Infidel

New Member
Sep 7, 2022
2
0
1
I'm having an issue where the linux image won't boot, just gets stuck on a flashing cursor. I can go into FreeDOS fine and run D1Cross, but I can't boot into linux at all. I've tried restarting multiple times, reverting and redoing the flash, removing other disks from the server but I can't get into it at all. Any help? I have an R420 with the D1 710 mini
I also saw one other post that seemed to be having the same problem I'm having but never found a resolution.
Some problem here but on an R520 (H710P D1, no PCIs or HDDs, all the stuff disabled in the BIOS as per recommendations). The first time I got as far as D1-H710, rebooted, got the expected kernel panic, then continued to get the same boot after boot. Booted back into DOS, reverted back to stock, rebooted, started the process again with no errors until booting into the Linux ISO (from USB). Every time I get "BOOT FAILED! - This Live System image failed to boot" and it drops to BusyBox. Exit out of that and there's the kernel panic again. I've reburned the image multiple times and tried other flash drives. It's getting to the point where I'm close to giving up and putting an H310 in.
 

Infidel

New Member
Sep 7, 2022
2
0
1
As is typical with these things, after a day of failing to get it working, I had it working within minutes of posting. I'd taken a PCI card out during the process of trying to get Linux to boot again, but the whole process wasn't successful until I'd restarted from scratch with the H710 reverted and no PCI cards.
 

jackofzerotrades

New Member
Sep 9, 2022
2
0
1
Hi fellows.

I'm here to ask for some hint or advice.

I just flashed my H710 D1 mini following this excellent guide/method :


i did everything correctly all seemed to work as expected.

The card is in a Dell R620.

I don't see what i'm missing but there is a strange behavior now.

I boot usb to install pfsense . It detects my 2 SSD and i can proceed with installation. No problem.

At the reboot the Dell bios do not detect the disks and cannot boot anythiing.

i did the installation in uefi mode. I'll try bios next.

What puzzles me is : How the OS (pfsense's bsd) can detect my SSD and not the bios's server ?

If someone can enlighten me i would be grateful.

Have a good day.
 

Lampbearer

New Member
Jan 14, 2018
2
0
1
57
I have an H710P out of a Dell R820. Info on FreeDOS reads "NA" for ChipRevision.
Suggestions on what next steps are?
Am heeding warning NOT to proceed until I know for sure what version.
Appreciate your hard work everyone. Have used this successfully before on other cards.
 

Piotrek

New Member
Oct 31, 2022
1
0
1
I have an H710P out of a Dell R820. Info on FreeDOS reads "NA" for ChipRevision.
You need to upgrade the firmware on that perc. Artofserver has a vid on it on yt:

@fohdeesha I have a H710p mini and I followed your excellent guide, but ran into issues erasing memory in the freedos image. Error reported was 524288.Is there anything I can follow up on to get it to rease and flash cleanly?
 

fohdeesha

Kaini Industries
Nov 20, 2016
2,729
3,080
113
33
fohdeesha.com
You need to upgrade the firmware on that perc. Artofserver has a vid on it on yt:

@fohdeesha I have a H710p mini and I followed your excellent guide, but ran into issues erasing memory in the freedos image. Error reported was 524288.Is there anything I can follow up on to get it to rease and flash cleanly?
pull power from server for a minute or two, then repower, and follow the guide starting from the erase command again. it should work now
 

josh

Active Member
Oct 21, 2013
615
190
43
Edit: Nvm realized I missed the line to restart the system
 
Last edited:

josh

Active Member
Oct 21, 2013
615
190
43
I flashed H310 Mini with no visible errors. Rebooted and all disks showing at OS level. But now I'm having problems with writing to the disks it seems. Tried both TrueNAS and Proxmox. Both throw errors when trying to wipe the drives.

Task viewer: Device sda - Wipe Disk

wiping block device /dev/sda
/dev/sda: 8 bytes were erased at offset 0xae9fffbf000 (zfs_member): 0c b1 ba 00 00 00 00 00
/dev/sda: 8 bytes were erased at offset 0xae9fffbe000 (zfs_member): 0c b1 ba 00 00 00 00 00
/dev/sda: 8 bytes were erased at offset 0xae9fffbd000 (zfs_member): 0c b1 ba 00 00 00 00 00
/dev/sda: 8 bytes were erased at offset 0xae9fffbc000 (zfs_member): 0c b1 ba 00 00 00 00 00
/dev/sda: 8 bytes were erased at offset 0xae9fffbb000 (zfs_member): 0c b1 ba 00 00 00 00 00
/dev/sda: 8 bytes were erased at offset 0xae9fffba000 (zfs_member): 0c b1 ba 00 00 00 00 00
/dev/sda: 8 bytes were erased at offset 0xae9fffb9000 (zfs_member): 0c b1 ba 00 00 00 00 00
/dev/sda: 8 bytes were erased at offset 0xae9fffb8000 (zfs_member): 0c b1 ba 00 00 00 00 00
/dev/sda: 8 bytes were erased at offset 0xae9fffb7000 (zfs_member): 0c b1 ba 00 00 00 00 00
/dev/sda: 8 bytes were erased at offset 0xae9fffb6000 (zfs_member): 0c b1 ba 00 00 00 00 00
/dev/sda: 8 bytes were erased at offset 0xae9fffb5000 (zfs_member): 0c b1 ba 00 00 00 00 00
/dev/sda: 8 bytes were erased at offset 0xae9fffb4000 (zfs_member): 0c b1 ba 00 00 00 00 00
/dev/sda: 8 bytes were erased at offset 0xae9fffb3000 (zfs_member): 0c b1 ba 00 00 00 00 00
/dev/sda: 8 bytes were erased at offset 0xae9fffffe00 (gpt): 45 46 49 20 50 41 52 54
/dev/sda: calling ioctl to re-read partition table: Success
dd: fdatasync failed for '/dev/sda': Input/output error
200+0 records in
200+0 records out
TASK ERROR: error wiping '/dev/sda': 209715200 bytes (210 MB, 200 MiB) copied, 134.019 s, 1.6 MB/s
 

amp88

Member
Jul 9, 2020
59
63
18
I flashed H310 Mini with no visible errors. Rebooted and all disks showing at OS level. But now I'm having problems with writing to the disks it seems. Tried both TrueNAS and Proxmox. Both throw errors when trying to wipe the drives.
Could you post the output from the following command, please?

Code:
smartctl -x /dev/sda