X10SL7-F LSI 2308 Hard Drives showing as 0 B

[snarkyJock]

I am having issues with my hard drives being presented in Hyper-V Disk Manager (Device Manager) and I cannot figure out where the issues are coming from. Can anyone provide me further ideas to figure out where my issues are coming from.


1. The first drive I connect to the LSI 2308 is always displayed as Read Only. I am not sure if this by design, but I am not able to make any changes so it can be used as a hard drive.

2. When I connect all 6 of my drives to the LSI 2308 I get the issue that the drive at position 0 is presented as having 0 B.



I have also checked what is happening in the LSI BIOS and it all seems to be ok to me.





Additional information
What I have tested:

• Drive check. Connect each drive individually to the LSI 2308: each drive shows up correctly e.g. 6.4 TB
• Port check: Connect a drive to each port on the LSI 2308 individually: each drive shows up correctly
• Cable check: Connect a working drive to the LSI 2308 using each cable individually: each drive shows up correctly

Build information:

• x10sl7-f (BIOS version 3.0)
• LSI 2308 flashed to IT mode (version 19)
• 6x WD Red 4TB (WD40ERFX

 

[Lance Joseph]

Does drive 0 show up in 'diskpart'? Try to select and clean the drive.
Get details for the volume. Is it readonly?
Try to clear the readonly attribute.

You could also grab a copy of smartmontools for Windows and run:
smartctl.exe -a -d sat /dev/pd0
Does that report SMART info?
If not, then check your cables.

Have you tried hotplugging the drive?
Does swapping drives to that same cable reproduce the issue?
Have you tried updating drivers from LSI's website?

Are there any disk or LSI related messages in the Windows System Event log?

Thanks

 

[snarkyJock]

Sorry for the late reply, I have been travelling a lot for work recently. Therefore I have not really had a chance to investigate this issue in more detail.

I need to do some further testing, including looking at the SMART data for the disks, but this is what I have found so far:

• If I connect a single disk to the LSI, it is shown correctly in the LSI BIOS and is available in Hyper-V. I have tried this with every disk on every port with every cable I own.
• The issue appears when I connect the second disk. Both disks are listed in the LSI BIOS with the correct capacity, but in Hyper-V the disk which is connected first is shown as 0.00 B. The second (and any other disks) are listed as having a correct capacity and are available for use.

I will collect the SMART data over the weekend. Any other ideas what might be going on?

 

[Lance Joseph]

That is very peculiar indeed. I would focus on removing the readonly attribute. Have you tried that yet?
I might also remove Windows from the equation, if only to work around the possibility of a device becoming readonly.

If you're comfortable with it, boot from an Ubuntu live USB.
Ubuntu has a number of invaluable disk utilities such as 'gnome-disks' and 'gparted'
With them you should be able to rewrite partition tables, check SMART data, and even zero out disks.
If it's possible to do simple read/write operations to all eight disks then I would go back to troubleshooting Windows.

Then again if you're not able to read/write to the drives in Ubuntu then I would suspect the controller to be faulty.
Either way, my recommended course of action should get you to the bottom of these peculiarities.