HP H220 SAS controller woes

[Sauron]

Hello,

 

I recently bought an h220 controller for use in a proliant dl360e gen8 server.

 

The problem is that when I connect two sets of drives to it with mini sas cables, the server fails to boot with the error "Media test failure, check cable". It works just fine with a single cable, regardless of which cable it is or which port it's connected to; the problem only appears with two cables. The HDDs are all recognized correctly and removing some of them did not help. Does anyone know what the issue could be?

 

I bought this on ebay as a refurbished unit and I already contacted the seller, but they haven't answered yet. If they don't answer I guess I'll assume it's defective and get a refund, but I wanted to hear you guys' opinion too.

[leadeater]

What type of cables are you using, SAS to 4 SATA break out or connecting up to the server backplane using SAS to SAS?

 

Edit:

Also that just sounds like it's PXE booting which I would expect to fail, you'd know if you were using it etc. Check the boot options and order, disable PXE as an option and see if that error doesn't show up.

[Sauron]

58 minutes ago, leadeater said:

What type of cables are you using, SAS to 4 SATA break out or connecting up to the server backplane using SAS to SAS?

 

Edit:

Also that just sounds like it's PXE booting which I would expect to fail, you'd know if you were using it etc. Check the boot options and order, disable PXE as an option and see if that error doesn't show up.

The cables are mini sas to mini sas, they connect to the backplane. The HDDs themselves are sas drives.

 

And you're right, that error comes from PXE - so it's unrelated, it just tries to boot from that when hdd boot fails. The actual error is probably what is displayed after that, which is "Non system disk or disk error".

 

In case it's relevant, I installed centos on a drive while I was waiting for the second cable to arrive - it boots with a single cable but not with two. Could it just be grub being picky?

[leadeater]

1 minute ago, Sauron said:

In case it's relevant, I installed centos on a drive while I was waiting for the second cable to arrive - it boots with a single cable but not with two. Could it just be grub being picky?

Sounds like it, might be a case of the bios changing the primary hdd on you when you change drives (add/remove), that would prevent the bios from seeing grub at all and breaking booting.

[NelizMastr]

20 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Sounds like it, might be a case of the bios changing the primary hdd on you when you change drives (add/remove), that would prevent the bios from seeing grub at all and breaking booting.

Especialy with HBAs and identical drives this is a major pain. One drive has the OS, good luck finding out which . I guess that's why I boot from SSD or SD card and leave the drives to an OS, passed through or otherwise.

[Sauron]

58 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Sounds like it, might be a case of the bios changing the primary hdd on you when you change drives (add/remove), that would prevent the bios from seeing grub at all and breaking booting.

 

38 minutes ago, NelizMastr said:

Especialy with HBAs and identical drives this is a major pain. One drive has the OS, good luck finding out which . I guess that's why I boot from SSD or SD card and leave the drives to an OS, passed through or otherwise.

All right, I'll just reinstall the OS and see if it works. I'll use a spare ssd to avoid ambiguity.