Removed HBA and installed RAID controller, no WebBIOS prompt

[Sean Ho]

Mask SMBus pins? Try the card in another machine?

 

[mobilenvidia]

One other thing the H710 has plenty of cooling ?
These RAID and also the HBA's controllers are heaters and will very quickly get hot
They are designed to go into rack enclores with forced cooling from front to back
Back in the day in my tower case I glued on a fan to the heasink as controllers in the 70+deg is not good
Batteries don't like getting hot either

Latest FW for H710p here
https://downloads.dell.com/FOLDER04455766M/1/SAS-RAID_Firmware_9MHJ5_WN64_21.3.5-0002_A09.EXE
Ofcourse won't do you any good if you can't boot
But your FW is possibly only one iteration older than latest

Maybe a factory reset with the Mobo BIOS, take battery out for a minute or so

Can you play with PCIe slots in the BIOS, ie disable or other settings ?
Maybe force PCIe Gen 3 or even 2 on that slot if Mobo supports Gen 4

 

[oneplane]

Completely different solution: run Windows as a VM, have the HBA as your storage device and make a big zvol or mdraid (+lvm) device available to it. Windows gets a normal looking block device and you get to use your hardware.

 

[ScottN]

Moving onto another card. I cannot have a finicky card in this server. I worked with the eBay seller and they gave me a refund. No need to return card. I've already ordered a *NEW* PERC H730 to be delivered early next week. Wish me luck with this one!

 

[ScottN]

Completely different solution: run Windows as a VM, have the HBA as your storage device and make a big zvol or mdraid (+lvm) device available to it. Windows gets a normal looking block device and you get to use your hardware.

This was my original plan to have TrueNAS Scale with Windows running as a VM. But the network bridge and other container apps that required configuration were clunky for the Windows side. The server primarily will be used as Windows, so we've made the decision to have Server 2019 as the host OS for this specific server. Other ones in the future may just be TrueNAS Scale.

These RAID and also the HBA's controllers are heaters and will very quickly get hot
They are designed to go into rack enclores with forced cooling from front to back

Agreed. This server will be sent off to a colocation hosting provider in the end. So yes it will be in that type of environment for production.

 

[ScottN]

Hello all, back again

I installed the PERC H730 RAID Controller into the server and it's detected and the server boots into Windows and shows in device manager. Success!

I'm trying to download the latest OMSA software but Dell support wants me to put in the service tag but I do not have one because all I'm using is the RAID controller and not a full server.

How to get the RAID controller OMSA management software download the round-about way?

 

[ScottN]

I went ahead and read back to replies of people when I thought I had a working controller and I went and downloaded the MegaRAID Storage Manager and was able to see the controller in there and setup my RAID configuration. Thank you all for your help. I think this wraps this up and if I need anything else, I will start a new post