Solved: C220 M5SX cannot change pSATA to SWRAID

aweissenfelt · ‎04-01-2019

Background info:

Server BIOS 4.0(2b)C

UCSM FW 4.0(2b)A

Server storage setup:

OS boot from SAN

2 x 512GB NVMe,

2 x 3.8TB 6G SATA SSD disks on PSATA controller

Server OS: Centos 7.6.1810

I've been battling with couple of these servers for a while now. First I tried to get them to boot from NVMe disk with no result and I decided to go with SAN boot which was much easier to set up. After I got CentOS installed, the system only sees NVMe disks plus the boot LUN from SAN when checking with fdisk -l, lsblk or lshw.

I have been trying to get CentOS to recognize the PSATA disks and tried all sort of Boot and Disk policies resulting that I managed to create virtual drive which I cannot remove and trying to change BIOS settings to LSI SW RAID mode results "sw raid configuration is not detected switching to ahci mode" in BIOS.

Can I somehow force delete the virtual drive via UCSM? I can't access the RAID configuration utility in KVM and I'm suspecting this is causing the PSATA mode change to fail -> OS cannot find the disks.

Is there some other configuration needed than changing Bios Policy -> Boot Options -> P-SATA mode to "LSI SW RAID"?

Thanks for your help!

Ari

Kirk J · ‎04-01-2019

You may want to create a boot entry for 'local embedded lun' which should cause the optionROM for the LSI software raid to present you with a 'control + M' option during POST. I would see if you can create or delete a VD from within that utility.

There were a few versions of redhat in the 7.3/5/6 era that didn't have the megaraidSR mod built in, and I'm wondering if your CentOS builds are impacted as well.

Kirk...

View solution in original post

Kirk J · ‎04-01-2019

You may want to create a boot entry for 'local embedded lun' which should cause the optionROM for the LSI software raid to present you with a 'control + M' option during POST. I would see if you can create or delete a VD from within that utility.

There were a few versions of redhat in the 7.3/5/6 era that didn't have the megaraidSR mod built in, and I'm wondering if your CentOS builds are impacted as well.

Kirk...

aweissenfelt · ‎04-02-2019

Thanks!

This lead to correct path. local LUN option in boot policy allowed me to delete virtual drive from raid configuration utility in BIOS (never got the "Ctrl + M" prompt.

I also noticed that I couldn't get PSATA disks at all in Legacy boot environment, so I reinstalled OS in EFI mode and now have Linux with all the disks available!