M1015 aka SAS9220-8i not found in BIOS - looks dead.

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Artzig

New Member
Dec 15, 2012
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Firstly thankyou for putting up the flashing details and surrounding information for the M1015 card. Having a good read of this and a couple of other sites made choosing a HBA for use in a FreeNAS system much easier. However.....:rolleyes:

I bought a M1015 card off the great auction house in the sky, off what looks to be a reputable seller. The card is only marked up as 'SAS9220-8i' and not 'M1015' although that doesn't seem odd from what others have said, it looks just like the ones that many others are using.

I put it into an Intel DP55KG motherboard to flash it, as its final destination, a Supermicro X9SCM-F was busy at the time. The system booted and first time round it reported:

LSI MegaRAID SAS-MFI BIOS
Version 4.30.00 (Build October 26, 2011)
Copyright(c) 2011 LSI Corporation

HA -0 (Bus 1 Dev 0) ServeRAID M1015 SAS/SATA Controller

0 JBOD(s) found on the host adapter
0 JBOD(s) handled by BIOS

0 Virtual Drive(s) found on the host adapter.

0 Virtual Drives(s) handled by BIOS


Fortunately I took a picture of the screen, a camera is always on hand when I'm building stuff to record settings etc. Now, that looked fine to me as nothing was plugged into it. I did some other work, lined up the flashing stuff and rebooted. And it disappeared!
So I tried a couple of other motherboards but can't see the card in any of them. None of the motherboards have problems that I'm aware of, none are overclocked etc . I've never got as far as trying to flash it as nothing picks it up. In all of the following variations I've tried, all from a bootable USB stick, booting into 2 different versions of DOS/DOS like OSs, playing with BIOS option ROMs where possible, disabling peripherals, stripping out unused cards, BIOS power modes, disabling absolutely everything etc etc, and then trying:
megaoem -adplist
&
megarec -readsbr 0 filename (appreciating that the 0 maybe meaningless if the card isn't found)
Nothing shows.
Depending on the setup I either get the PAL error or the Exit Error ( the X9SCM-F actually reveals a bit more about this fault and also says something along the lines of 'card not found')
Where possible I've also tried UEFI modes although these need further playing with. UEFI is new to me, but looks interesting.

Motherboard 1
Intel DP55KG + i5 760. Tried in slots 2,4 & 7 for x16, x8 and x4(open backed connector). This board will show if a card is populating a PCI/PCIe slot in the BIOS. Nothing shows.
Motherboard 2
Supermicro X9SCM-F with E3-1220Lv2 Xeon (IvyBridge) with v2.0b BIOS. In all slots. No other cards present as onboard VGA is being used. Nothing shows. Also nothing shows in the UEFI PCI report.
also
the same Supermicro X9SCM-F motherboard but with a Celeron G550T (SandyBridge). Again v2.0b BIOS. I had a G550T in reserve in case the X9SCM-F landed with a v1.x BIOS and needed a SandyBridge CPU to upgrade it before the IvYBridge Xeon went in. Some people have also had issues with IvyBridge CPUs and M1015s.
Motherboard 3
Many people seem to have had better success flashing M1015s in ASUS motherboards. Tried it in an ASUS Maximus Fourmula E3374. Again in all PCIe slots, also with a PCIe graphics card present and then using an old PCI one. Again nothing.

I made the M1015 a plug in lead with two LEDs on it and plugged it into the 4 way header to see if they'd light or report anything as the card does not show any lights (if there are any to light) at any stage. Again nothing.

Anybody ideas on where or what to try next? Has it previosly been flashed going by its report screen seen the first time round?

Is it dead Jim?
 
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Artzig

New Member
Dec 15, 2012
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About to work my way through this
http://brycv.com/blog/2012/flashing-it-firmware-to-lsi-sas9211-8i/

EDIT: Tried this by setting up the USB stick using FlashBootDOS and the relevent files, entering setup on the X9SCM-F, going the EXIT tab and selecting exit to UEFI shell.

It comes back that the sas2flash.efi command has aborted due to the absence of a controller. The shell command 'PCI' will throw up all the PCI devices and the M1015 doesn't show.
 
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MuVy

New Member
Jan 24, 2013
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I too am experiencing the same issues, try 3 different ASUS boards and a HP DL180 and same on all no web bios or detected in the bios or windows. I havent tried a UEFI board as I dont have one handy. Any suggestions at all, before I email seller and ask for replacement/refund?
 

mrkrad

Well-Known Member
Oct 13, 2012
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should work fine, i use the M5014/5015 in DL180 G6/DL360 G6/DL380 G7 no problemo.

I usually flash with a simple Z400 workstation though. Far faster than waiting for the server to start up.