System won't boot with HBA and no devices attached

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oshae

New Member
Aug 11, 2012
3
0
1
This may seem like a painfully obvious question but here goes.

I bought an LSI SAS3444E HBA, it has 4 internal SATA ports and 1 external mini-SAS 8088 port. I specifically bought this card because it was a good deal on eBay and all I wanted was the external SAS port to connect an external LTO-3 drive that I acquired.

I was going to put the card into an ESXi server I have built but alas it is a mini-ITX system with only one PCI-Express slot taken up by a quad NIC. I wanted some way to use the tape drive to back up my home NAS. So I pulled out this HP 5800 series desktop I used to use that has Windows Server 2008R2 on it. I couldn't use my main desktop as I am using Backup Exec 2010 to back up the NAS and you can't install BE on Windows 7.

So that is pretty much how I got myself into this situation. My only option being to install the HBA into this HP desktop. After installing the card and booting up I got the LSI prompt to enter its BIOS to configure the card. Thing is I didn't really want to do anything with the card other than boot into Windows (off the onboard SATA controller) and install the drivers so I could connect my external SAS tape drive. So I just let the system continue to boot, and of course eventually the LSI card did not find any devices attached to it and the machine would just hang right there, not even enabling me to get into the system BIOS to modify the boot order.

So I plugged the SATA CD-ROM in the desktop into one of the SATA ports on the HBA, the card detected the device and voila the system continued to boot off the onboard SATA controller and I could even enter the BIOS and make sure the boot order was the onboard controller first and the LSI card after. But if I disconnect the CD-ROM from the card then I'm right back to where I started.

So essentially my question is whether or not this is normal behavior? Should the system hang up on the LSI card initialization if there are no devices connected to it? Should it not just continue to boot off the onboard controller?
 

Mike

Member
May 29, 2012
482
16
18
EU
Sounds like a slight incompatibility, sadly. If no one knows a solution i'm afraid only HP can help you out on this one. Perhaps they have a slightly newer bios available, I know most vendors have beta bios's on hand for these small problems.

I have a m-itx board too and it has an m-pcie slot, if you are not after speed and the card is compatible with 1x lane (250mbps with the 1.0 pcie standard still), there are 'riser cards' available somewhere on the web.