No config/post menu from Perc H730 HBA on Supermicro Motherboard

[voip-ninja]

I'm in the process of trying to swap the RAID controller on my X11-SCA-F based home server from an older LSI card to a Dell PERC H730 that I just received. This is being done ahead of an ESXi 6.7->7.0 upgrade I'm going to need to do for some new stuff I am going to be testing out.

The system boots, but I never get a POST screen that gives me the option of entering the RAID controller's configuration so that I can import my volumes (I plan on importing my existing RAID-1 set to the new controller if possible).

Instead the system just boots ESXi 6.7 from USB and once ESXi is up and running if I log into it I can see that the PERC H730 card is discovered as ESXi shows it as a storage adapter.

Is there something I'm missing? Can the PERC only be configured from a Dell server running iDRAC?

Thanks.

 

[mrpasc]

Do you boot UEFI or Bios?
Did you set the “option ROM” mode accordingly?
Have had several PERC730 / PERC730P in different AsrockRack and SM boards and was able to configure them.

 

[voip-ninja]

I think I figured the problem out.

Thanks for the suggestions.

 

[mrpasc]

Always nice to post the solution, just in case someone other with similar issue stumbles across…

 

[voip-ninja]

Fair point.

I'm actually not 100% what the resolution was.

I had both DVI and VGA cables connected between the X11 motherboard onboard video and my lab monitor. I wasn't really paying attention to which output was working, but I believe that due to me using an HDMI loopback plug also on the motherboard (for pass through of the onboard video to Plex on a specific VM) the VGA output was being interrupted and wasn't getting redirected to DVI.

I disconnected the VGA cable and then also disconnected the HDMI loop plug and started to get the RAID controller right at the start of the boot sequence.

Unfortunately I spent so much time doing this stuff that I got into a rush trying to migrate the HBA and when I imported my volume to the H730 (which worked) ESXi host could not see the data store at all, and forced me to wipe the volume and build a new datastore on it.

So now I'm going to have to restore and/or rebuild all of my VMs.

Story of my IT life. Get clobbered by some stupid small problem and lose track of the bigger picture, with disastrous results.