Some notes/hints for H710 Mini (and probably others)

[marcan]

I found myself having to crossflash an H710 and amusingly enough circled back from your guide to marcan/lsirec#1 and back here :)

Just a few notes that you might find helpful:

• After the initial wipe using the FreeDOS ISO, reboot, then issue an iDRAC reset (you can go into the BIOS or whatever while that happens). This forces iDRAC to notice that the PERC controller is gone, and to stop trying to talk to it over whatever channel it uses. Once the iDRAC reboot is complete, connect the Linux ISO via virtual media and boot it. I'm not sure if this fixes anything, but it's probably a good idea to make sure the iDRAC isn't trying to talk to the controller.

• If you must, you should wait 30 seconds before the lsirec rescan command, not after. That way the driver probes after the card has had a chance to boot properly. Though I haven't experienced long boot times in hostboot mode.

• I see the main erase command often failing the first time for some reason. Once it happened in FreeDOS (the second retry that's already baked into the script worked), then in Linux it also seems to cause things to crash. This makes the subsequent lsiutil processes fail. To recover, redo the whole lsirec thing again:

lsirec 0000:$addr unbind
lsirec 0000:$addr halt
lsirec 0000:$addr hostboot <firmware>
lsirec 0000:$addr rescan
lsiutil -p1 -a 3,8, 33

Just like the FreeDOS case, the second time it works fine, so you might want to throw it into the script like that.

• You might want to consider packaging IR firmware too. I use this since I boot off of an OS-only pair of boot drives (in hardware RAID1), and then use two other drives in JBOD mode as data drives. This is the one I used: https://docs.broadcom.com/docs-and-downloads/host-bus-adapters/host-bus-adapters-common-files/sas_sata_6g_p20/9207_8i_Package_P20_IR_IT_FW_BIOS_for_MSDOS_Windows.zip

• After the flash, you don't have to reboot Linux again. Instead, you can do this:

lsirec 0000:$addr unbind
# This will time out, that's normal the first time after a flash since it's copying flash data or something
lsirec 0000:$addr reset
# Wait a while, checking `info` repeatedly
lsirec 0000:$addr info
# After a while, `info` will return FAULT. This is the issue causing the kernel panic on the first reboot. Just reset it again.
lsirec 0000:$addr reset
# Now it will have come up properly, so rescan
lsirec 0000:$addr rescan

Then set the SAS address. This is optional because you're going to reboot anyway, but after setting it, you can get Linux to notice the new SAS address like this:

lsirec 0000:$addr unbind
lsirec 0000:$addr rescan

Were you unable to get the all-Linux path with lsirec to work? I read the discussion of the differing SBR sizes, but I don't know what ended up happening and how you wound up back on FreeDOS for the SBR write.

[Fohdeesha]

The man himself! Thanks for the hints, I've had some of these on my list already, as well as a new "troubleshooting" page with the common issues and fixes, to reduce some of my email load - I will add these to the list. And nope, I was never able to get anything inside *nix to successfully touch/alter the SBR of these cards - nuked a couple trying. So hence the annoying freedos first step.