LSI 9260-8i started giving FW Fault 0xF0010002 on POST/Boot

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Cyber Akuma

New Member
Jan 9, 2013
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So far I haven't had much luck trying to get any help about this.

I have a LSI 9260-8i, this was actually reflashed from the original IRM ServeRAID M5014 it arrived as. It has since also been upgraded to the latest firmware from LSI/Broadcom, which is 12.15.0-0239 (also the card at boot identifies as BIOS version "3.30.02.2 (Build June 17, 2014)"). I am just simply using it in my Windows 10 system, not as part of a server or NAS.

This card had been disconnected from my system for about 6-12 months, as well as it's drives, I recently reconnected everything in a new system. I have four HDDs in a RAID5, but had recently acquired the license key to enable RAID6 and had installed a 5th HDD in preparation for that. I had a few errors at first, but many things in the system were at first giving me errors so I didn't think much of it as I had performed several upgrades and changes at once.

I eventually got everything booting properly and then opened up the RAID Windows management software (Version 17.05.02.01 at the time) and it seemed to be going ok. It was performing a Patrol Read on all of my drives and was recharging the battery (Though it claimed the battery was bad, but it was new, so I figured it needed to do a recharge cycle and re-learn to see it as good again). It said the Patrol Read was only going to take 10 minutes but I knew it was going to take hours. Halfway in, at about the 3-4 hour mark, the software completely stopped responding. I restarted it, and now the card was showing that absolutely nothing was installed to it.

I performed a reboot and now I kept getting an error message during the card's initialization during post:
LSI MegaRAID SAS-MFI BIOS Version 3.30.02.2 (Build June 17, 2014) Copyright(c) 2014 LSI Corporation Host Adapter Bus 5 Dev 0:
F/W is in Fault State MFI Register State 0xF0010002
Adapter at Baseport is not responding
No MegaRAID Adapter Installed
The card then could be seen as installed, but the drives were not showing up, and the management software could not even tell a card was installed anymore. I tried updating to the latest management software (17.05.06.00) in case it might at least see there is a card installed, with that being it's own can of worms of expecting me to manually install OpenJDK and set the environment paths myself, it also just gets stuck loading the application.

I tried MegaCLI, StorCLI, and MegaSCU (I admit I am not too familiar with managing this card through a CLI) but -v and -AdpAllInfo -aALL but they all returned nothing. I tried disconnecting the drives in case one had somehow become so fault during storage that it was crashing it, and no difference. I tried the only other PCI socket in my motherboard and it would not even boot then, guess that socket isn't even working with everything else installed in my system.

I have no idea what to do now. The card refuses to work, claiming it's suffering some kind of firmware fault on POST, none of the software seems to even detect the presence of the card at all despite it physically showing up in Device Manager (although with an "An I/O adapter hardware error has occurred." error) and HWiNFO, and I am not aware of any way I can attempt a force-reflash of the firmware in case it's a software issue (although I somehow doubt it) or of what else to try.
 

Cyber Akuma

New Member
Jan 9, 2013
5
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1
I think I might have a lead, but it's incredibly odd and makes little sense. Remember how I said at first the card was working but then crashed during the Patrol Read and was not working again? I noticed that the card was reporting the BBU temperature was high when it was doing the Patrol Read. Normally my case has a 200mm side-fan that would be blowing across all the PCIe ports, but since I am working on the computer all the side panels are off. I had noticed previously that the card would run hot with the side panel/fan removed but was fine when it was in place so I decided to just put a desk fan blowing towards the card, it crashed shortly after.

The fan was angled towards the PC the whole time I was trying to work on it, and it wasn't something that I was actively thinking about. I also performed many stress tests with the card disconnected and the fan blowing on the system with no issues.

Recently though I turned it off to move it out of the way so I would have more room to work, and that's when the card started to mysteriously work again. I left it like this and it not only finished it's patrol read but kept working fine, I left it overnight and it still was working fine in the morning. I tried turning on and pointing the fan on it again and within minutes the system bluescreened, when I rebooted the Windows client software for the RAID card immediately gave me a popup that the card had suffered a fatal error and was reset.

What on Earth is going on? The card runs fine when it's barely within/above it's standard operating temperatures but it crashes if I try to cool it? Has anyone ever heard of something like this? Is this a sign that the card is damaged or would pointing a desk fan at a PC normally cause problems like this? This makes no sense to me.
 

pricklypunter

Well-Known Member
Nov 10, 2015
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Canada
Classic symptoms of a dry/ cold solder joint. When nice and toasty, everything expands, making contact, but when cooled, everything shrinks, breaking said contact. Some electrolytic capacitors also cause a similar symptom, but not because of thermal expansion, they do it because they dry out and their ESR (equivalent series resistance) changes until they can no longer perform well in the application. Either way, the card is dodgy and will not be reliable :)
 
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