PSA: repairing "dead" IBM M5015 SAS card

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stamasd

Member
May 30, 2020
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Hi, this is my first post, and it's meant to document what I did to repair one of my M5015 cards that was apparently dead.

The card used to work fine, until a reboot. After that, the card seemed to have completely disappeared. No POST banner, did not show in BIOS, undetected by lspci.

Thanks to Art Of Server on YouTube Art of Server because he pointed me towards the probable cause: blown PCIe fuse.

I took the heatsink off and started exploring what looked like fuses, on both sides of the card. I did this with a multimeter and comparing with a known good M5015.

I found a total of 3 fuses, one on the front side and 2 on the back side, all 3 just above the short part of the PCIe connector. On the good card they were all good, but on the bad card 2 of them were blown. On the front of the card, the blown fuse is marked F2B1. On the back, the blown one is unmarked.

I did a quick bodge by bridging the blown fuses with short lengths of wire, put the card back in the motherboard, booted, and... it works. I will be doing a "real" repair later by actually replacing the blown fuses with good ones (need to order, don't have any right now).

In the pictures, the red-circled parts marked with "X" are the blown fuses. Bridging those brought the card back to life.

Notice on the back side of the card, the blown fuse is unmarked. There is another one to the left of it, marked F5M2 - that one was not blown and did not need repair.
 

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stamasd

Member
May 30, 2020
38
10
8
Asylum. :D Appropriate, I need one.
I just figured out that the unmarked fuse on the back side is actually marked F5M1 - but the marking is on the other side of the cutout, above the "X" in the second picture.

I'm actually emboldened by this result and just got on ebay very cheaply a lot of dead 9206-16e cards which exhibit the same symptoms, to see if I can repair them. If not, it will be the price I pay for learning. Haha.
 

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