Troubleshooting LSI 9201-16e

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

Will5001

New Member
May 23, 2021
2
0
1
Hi all,

Very new to this - so forgive if there is something obvious I've overlooked but I have spent days trying to work this out.

What I'm trying to do is use an LSI 9201-16e to operate in JBOD mode for a set of 8 HGST 3TB Drives with the rest of the system being spare hardware I have around.

I cannot get the drives to spin up but the HBA is recognised. It's all second hand hardware (except the cables).

What I have done:
1. Flashed the HBA to the latest firmware and BIOS
2. Tried in multiple machines (one an intel based Z87 Asus Sabertooth motherboard, and the other an AMD based Asus M5A97 Pro) both running Windows 10
3. Tried other Hard Drives: bought a cheap 300GB HP drive.

Troubleshooting done so far:
1. Seated and reseated in the PCIE -moved to the primary slot. The heartbeat LED flashes green 1 sec on and off
2. Used two SAS cables and ensured they 'click' into position - these are the type with molex power supply so no 3.3v going to the HDDs
3. Checked power is making it to the drives with a multimeter on the end of the cables.
4. Hunted in the BIOS and changed legacy boot modes to all conceivable iterations.

Outputs:

SAS2Flash tells me:

LSI Corporation SAS2 Flash Utility
Version 20.00.00.00 (2014.09.18)
Copyright (c) 2008-2014 LSI Corporation. All rights reserved

Adapter Selected is a LSI SAS: SAS2116_1(B1)

Controller Number : 0
Controller : SAS2116_1(B1)
PCI Address : 00:06:00:00
SAS Address : 5000d31-0-006c-da09
NVDATA Version (Default) : 14.01.00.07
NVDATA Version (Persistent) : 14.01.00.14
Firmware Product ID : 0x2213 (IT)
Firmware Version : 20.00.07.00
NVDATA Vendor : LSI
NVDATA Product ID : SAS9201-16e
BIOS Version : 07.39.02.00
UEFI BSD Version : 07.27.01.01
FCODE Version : N/A
Board Name : SAS9201-16e
Board Assembly : H3-25519-00A
Board Tracer Number : SV33129082

Finished Processing Commands Successfully.
Exiting SAS2Flash.


It seems the card is detected, has the right firmware etc but just doesn't initialise the HDDs or tell them to spin up. I don't see any indication the card is booting up in the startup sequence before Windows is displayed.

Is what I am trying to do impossible? I.e. do I need something other than W10 as an OS or server type motherboards instead as hardware? I am sure I read that it has worked for others.

Despite the card showing up in device manager and showing the right stuff in sas2flash - is there a chance it is not working right?

Is there a utility or software I am missing? I downloaded MegaRaid Storage manager but it doesn't tell me anything Sas2Flash doesn't (except it has a line on the output about a "Firmware Package Version" which appears nowhere in the SAS2Flash outputs.
 

Will5001

New Member
May 23, 2021
2
0
1
Just in case anyone comes across this. The problem here was the mismatch in NVDATA versions. I had to erase all data using the sas2flash utility in EFI Shell and then reinstall the firmware.

It works in Ubuntu now - I don't see any reason it wouldn't also work in Windows but haven't checked yet.