help with LSI 3801e (1068e) only seeing 1st drive on each port!?

[bp_968]

I have two LSI 3801e 8 external port (2 8088) PCIe cards in my new ESX machine I'm building. I am running the 8088 cables into a homemade DAS out of a 4u case. Right now I am only seeing whatever drive ends up on the first sata cable that breaks out of the 8087 4-lane SAS cable.

Does anyone have any idea why *both* cards would only be showing/seeing the first drive in the SATA chain? Right now the setup goes like this:

Server -> LSI3801e -> 3ft 8088 cable -> 8088 to 8087 PCI adapter plate/card -> 2-3ft 8087 to 4 SATA breakout cable -> drives.

I tried different 8088 cables, different ports on the controller card, different ports on the PCI adapter plate and known good 8087 cables inside the case. Nothing works. I was considering ordering a 8088 - 4 port SATA cable to take the PCI plate out of the "chain" and see if maybe it was the culprit? Its really frustrating because I specifically spent the extra cash on the PCI plate because I wanted solid/safe external connections designed to be external (the 8088) rather then a "hack job" of 8088 to 4 port sata through a grommit or something.

BTW, this issue happened on the old firmware it came with and I updated the FW and flashed both cards to IT mode (for ZFS) and they are still doing the same thing.

Thanks!

 

[bp_968]

I wanted to answer this so hopefully someone who runs into a similar problem can find it through google. It was a firmware problem on the cards themselves. With their old FW they were only showing one drive per 8088 port, regardless how many drives were actually there. Updating the bios/FW didn't fix the problem. I ended up running the commmand:

sasflash -o -e 7

that totally erases the card. I then updated it with the correct FW/BIOS combo (IT in my case) and then ran: sasflash -o -sasadd <sas address>

Since the erase blanks out the cards sas address make sure you write it down first or you will have to pull the card and copy it down off the sticker on the card.

After I erased them and reflashed them all was well, they now see all the drives attached.