I purchased a LSI 9200-16E and a HP 487738-001 expander to hook up 24 drives to my server. I flashed the LSI card to IT mode and the card shows up fine and the drives show up. When I plug the LSI card into my server it is detected and all the drives show up in the bios but it will not boot ESXI. If I unplug the drives from the controller it boots just fine with the controller. If i power it on when the drives are attached it goes through the normal process but then right before it would normally load esxi it just sits on a blank screen. I have let it sit on that screen for a while but it never does anything. I have been testing more on another motherboard and it gives similar behavior. One thing I have found is if I power on the server and then plug in the drives they show up and are completely usable. Then if I shut down the computer and start it up with the drives attached it boots normally. If I power off the PSU it won’t boot with the drives attached and I’ll have to repeat the process again to get it to start. Is there something I’m missing here? Would this have something to do with not having a battery with the sas card? What other troubleshooting steps could I do?
It might be trying to boot from the SAS card. Did you flash the BIOS onto it (and did you flash both EFI-BIOS and “regular old” BIOS)? If so try and get into the card’s settings during boot and try to disable booting off of it.
If you don’t get an option to get into the card’s configuration during boot and didn’t flash it without a BIOS then you might be having trouble with BIOS vs UEFI. Some motherboards have options to force expansion cards to boot in BIOS mode, lacking that you could try just forcing the whole boot process into BIOS mode, rather than EFI and see if that gets you anywhere.
I don’t think it will be the battery on the card. I’ve used loads of RAID controllers without the cache battery installed.
Was ESXi installed before you added the card, or did you do a fresh install?
You might want to do a fresh install if so. Backup your stuff, of course.
Disabling booting from the card worked. The option I had to change was Boot Mode and I had assumed it was talking about UEFI vs BIOS. Thanks for the help.
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