I have an AMD Epyc 7252 on a ASRock Rack ROME6U-2L2T and am trying to configure some storage controllers. (Areca ARC-1226, Areca ARC-1882 and Adaptec ASA-80165h). None of these boards show the boards BIOS during boot-up. (They all get listed by ‘lspci’ in Xubuntu, so I know they are working.) I have tried CSM Mode On and Off, plus setting OpROM options to UEFI and to Legacy. I never see the OpROM.
What am I missing?
Thanks.
Most all the newer raid cards have moved their low level configuration utilities into the UEFI BIOS itself rather than the old school OpROM accessed during boot from decades ago.
Take a look in your UEFI BIOS for the card’s options.
I cannot find anything related to any of the cards in the UEFI BIOS.
Pulled out an old Shuttle computer with an AMD Phenom processor. Both Areca cards show their BIOS after the computer POSTS. Neither of the Adaptec cards show anything.
Starting to suspect my two Adaptec cards may have problems. Not sure.
that is unfortunate, you will have to configure the card from inside of the OS via the management software. i have seen RAID settings in very odd locations in the UEFI menu, did you go through every screen?
that is normal behavior for this config.
We typically use a dedicated linux installation with the configuration utilities installed to configure cards.
Done properly, you will never interface with the card again.
And if you need to, you should not be in the production environment as the risk of data loss is too great.
I am doing another RAID data recovery currently and the only way to recover the array was using a dedicated installation to prep the card outside of prod deployment.
Do you have secure mode enabled?
I did a test on one of my romed6u-2l2t with a zen2 epyc cpu, and it didn’t show the oprom prompt. I did some tests and somehow borked the bios and reflashed bios 3.50. Afterwards I saw the oprom prompt of an old LSI SAS HBA controller during POST (via web kvm, I didn’t see the oprom via SOL via LAN console). Not sure if it was because because of the reflashing itself or just the reflashing reset some settings I’ve previously done.
I have another romed6u-2l2t but with a Zen3 CPU, with a mellanox card but without a SAS adapter installed. There I can see the Mellanox options after I entered the UEFI bios.
I also had an old 3ware raid card where it tried to show the oprom but the screen didn’t like the screen resolution (?) and just turned black
Running Linux on the AMD Phenom system results in lspci not seeing either Adaptec cards.
I grabbed an i5-13K system and tried and basically get the same results as the Epyc system. (Sees card but can’t do anything with it.)
I downloaded the utilities from Microchip (Adaptec) website. When I run the utility I get the message “Number of cards: 0” but lspci shows “01:00.0 Serial Attached SCSI controller: PMC-Sierra Inc. PM8072 Tachyon SPCv 12G 16-port SAS/SATA controller (rev 06)”.
Very confused now.
I get oprom show for my old LSI card with these standard settings:
But in my case I don’t really need the oprom stuff. I’ve never used the LSI oprom screen/utility.
I can configure everything from linux.
Does it show your drives via lsblk command?
Some BIOSes has a separate question on if the option rom should be run or not. It might help to post pictures of the BIOS settings. Also are those particular cards (not model, but those physical cards) known to display an option rom on other systems? (just to rule that out, it’s possible with some cards to reflash them and not include the option rom),
The only other thing I would check is that I’m on the latest version of the system BIOS, just to rule out any weirdness there and be starting from a best known state.
ipmitools installed?
normal behavior, consumer grade builds cannot recognize enterprise grade hardware
I setup my BIOS to match the settings that gysi showed. It seemed to make no difference as far as seeing the boot OpROM.
I grabbed the drives and command line utilities from Microship’s website. I am unable to install the drivers in Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 14.04 or Ubuntu 12.04. The driver install always fails complaining about something. (Code in the source is unreferenced???)
I then installed Windows 7 on the system. The card shows up in Device Manager as a “SAS Controller”. However, when I go to install the drivers from Microchip’s website, it says the driver is not compatable with this card. (???)
This is where I am at right now.
Quick update…
I ended up purchasing a Broadcom 9400-16e and that seems to be working well. The Broadcom card adds an entry to my UEFI BIOS under the Advanced menu. (That is something the Adaptec cards did not do.)
I’m giving up on the Adaptec cards at this point. Chalk this one up to a lesson learned.
Thanks for all of the assistance.