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

[fohdeesha]

There is no iDRAC installed. I installed everything direclty from vga console, just FYI.

Huh? R520s have idrac express built into the motherboard

 

[nas-builder11759]

Huh? R520s have idrac express built into the motherboard

The iDRAC card/slot was missing or not installed. Checked original Dell spec and it was not listed/included.

 

[amp88]

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.

 

[fohdeesha]

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]

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.

 

[Sleyk]

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.

Remember, once you flash the card, it won't show up in the bios/lifecycle firmware, but you will see it in your NAS software/OS software or Operating System :.)

You can flash the MPT bios roms using the flashing instructions though, and it will show on bootup.

 

[fohdeesha]

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