Issues with my LSI 9211-8i "unable to load avago technologies mpt bios"

[skoalcherry]

Hello,

Long time reader, first time poster.

 

Last year i bought an LSI 9211-8i card off ebay and a good friend of mine helped me to re-flash the card into IT mode.

The card currently has the 20.00.07.00-it firmware (which i believe is the latest?)

Anyway, i started to use this card 3 months ago and it has been working flawlessly until 1½ week ago.

A electrician was in my home and cut the power to the whole house when he was fixing in the living room.

When i turned my PC back on the card started to act strange (although no other components did/does that)

 

Occasionally all hdds connected to the card just disappears from windows and i have to reboot to be able to access them again.

If im unlucky this message also shows upon loading the cards bios "unable to load avago technologies mpt bios".

 

I have tried to switch the card into different pcie slots on my motherboard, but the result is still the same.

I was able to avoid this problem for 5 straight days now, but was forced to reboot my machine today. Five hours after the reboot all drives just disappeared and i needed to reboot.

One thing i have noticed is, when the card goes FUBAR and i shut down the computer, im forced to turn it off on the powerbutton on the case, otherwise its like card is still sending power to the drives (i can see that they got power through the hdd cage led).

 

Does anyone have a solution to this? I doubt its windows (W7 x64) that's the problem since it can act strange on the BIOS level.

Will it help to re-flash the card? I mean, it do have the latest FW afaik.

Has anyone else experienced anything like this?

 

Mobo: Asus ROG STRIX X99

CPU: Intel 6800K

GPU: EVGA 1080TI SC2
PSU: Corsair HX1000W

[alpenwasser]

Power losses are tricky beasts. Usually nothing terrible happens, but it could be that some piece of hardware actually got damaged. Reflashing doesn't sound like the stupidest idea though; could be that something in the card's bios or firmware got corrupted but the hardware itself is fine.

 

I'd also try to make sure that the  HDDs themselves are still okay (I would presume that they are, but one never knows). And maybe try out some other storage device on the LSI card; something which hasn't had contact with it yet. If you do, make sure (if you can) that you've tested the HDDs first and that the LSI card doesn't kill stuff which is connected to it (unlikely, but I have actually had that happen with a SATA controller which was defective back in the day -- fried three HDDs of mine).

 

Running the card in another computer could also be useful, if you can find one into which you can put it.

 

A diagnostics utility could also be of potential use. See if lsiutil gives you anything useful. Zip archive download with versions for major operating systems here:

https://www.broadcom.com/site-search?q=lsiutil

 

It even has an efi version if you can't get into your OS; never tried that though, only the Linux version.

 

Make sure to be careful; you can do pretty much anything with it, including breaking stuff.

 

Here's some guidance on the tool:

https://www.thomas-krenn.com/de/wikiDE/images/4/44/Lsi_userguide_2006_20130528.pdf

[skoalcherry]

@alpenwasser Hello and thanks for your reply!

I followed your guide when re-flashing the card and the re-flash itself was succesfull!

AFAIK the drives are working 100% as inteended, i have not noticed anything strange with them what so ever, they are also brand new.

 

When running diganostics i did not come across anything unusual, and as stated above, the card re-flashed fine.

If there still issues with the card i guess its broken?

Im not sure if i did the right thing, but i re-flashed to the same version(P20 IT-mode) as it was before.

[alpenwasser]

If you're still having issues, I would indeed suspect that something is physically broken.

 

Reflashing with the same version sounds like the right idea, though you could always try another version just to see what happens.

 

I would try to make sure that it really is the card and not the drives or anything else in the PC before you go and buy a new one, but I realize that if you don't have another machine available to test things, this will be rather difficult.

[skoalcherry]

Now it happend again. Less then 24 hours after the re-flash.

 

Maybe something is wrong with the drivers aswell, i have no idea about that.
Is there any alternative drivers for win7? 

[skoalcherry]

LOL LOL LOL LOL

 

THIS IS FISHY AS F*CK!

When i removed the driver in my device manager and searched for changes, the card updated itself (LSI Adapter, SAS 2008 Falcon)

and the harddrives poped right back in windows....

 

Maybe its a driver fault then?

But as stated above, where can i find a good alternate driver for win7 x64?

Thanks in advance.

 

EDIT!

I can tell you whats NOT working, the win8.1 driver, it installed successfully but upon removing it, i ended up with bluescreen and had to boot from USB-stick and disable lsi_sas2.sys upon boot.

[alpenwasser]

That does sound pretty freaking funky.

 

I must admit I can't really help much with Windows -- I'm a Linux guy, mostly. It does seem a bit weird that these issues started right when the electrician did his thing, but it could always be coincidence, of course (or just something really weird).

[skoalcherry]

Yeah, its very strange indeed.

Im going to try the card in another system when i get the opportunity, if it works there, i will need to re-install this system.

Thank you for your support! 

[Arudis]

I'm going to assume you've tried different pcie slots. 

 

Shut everything down, pop it out and have a look at the card itself. Any busted caps? Any weird corrosion?  Next, if you have a spare drive, remove the OS drive and pop in a new one and do a clean install using the drivers that worked fine before.  Plug it all back in and see if it recurs. I had a similar problem with an IBM M1015 which I flashed with the IT mode firmware.  Mine was a power outage during this year's hurricane season. Pulled out hair trying to figure it all out. In the end I gave up, booted up an Ubuntu live usb to back up all the data and set it going before I left for work. When I came home it was still going which was a total surprise which gave me the idea that something in Windows got boned during the power outage. Stopped the backup, reinstalled windows on a different SSD and tested it. Worked fine for a week and then some while I finished the backup .   

 

After that I abandoned that project and started experimenting with freenas and zfs in Ubuntu and fedora. I was only using windows to make it easier on my house m8. Decided that I'd rather just build an HTPC for watching in the living room and use Ubuntu and zfs for the NAS in another room. But while it was doing the backup and for a week and change it worked flawlessly with a clean windows install.