[jwhat]

Hi Jan-Jaap,

thanks very much for weighing in on this one.

Your Nekochan posting on putting SAS3442X-R into O350 motivated me to put one into my O350.
It was a really nice job.

I also did some further digging around and as you say there is so much stuff on the "revised" BroadCom support page is is hard to know where to start...

I downloaded the following:
- Installer_P19_for_Linux
- SAS3442XR_ Package_P21_IR_IT_Firmware_BIOS_for_MSDOS_Windows
- SAS3442XR_P20_Supports_SAS_1-5G_3G_6G_and_SATA_1-5G_3G_HDD

I used the Installer for LINUX and that got me to point of getting diagnostics etc but none of the firmware packages have AO version firmware.

So I next tired the SuperMicro site which had various LSI image and managed to get the BIOS updated (removing the "Beta" software message that come up on boot) but could not find any A0 firmware again.

So backtracking I decided to see what HP had, as I come across a posting that HP frequently changed LSI boards within its product life-cycle without any change in part no.
The result was I found reference to an HP Support Pack (SP45154) that had a A0 firmware version for what HP sold as "HP 8 Internal Port SAS HBA with RAID".

This pack came with DOS sasflash tool, so I had to dig out old MS DevNet CDs with MS-DOS 6.22 floppy images and created a virtual floppy via VM which I then dd'ed over to USB floppy drive.

Result is I have board with firmware 1.23.46.0 which seems to be acceptable for the Fuel as it does not complain about firmware version any more.

Getting to this point has taken a lot of web surfing and reading up on LSI SAS3442X-R boards and software, but now at least I know a bit about it ;-)

I have yet to connect a disk to board, as I have spent some considerable time just playing with setting up a flashing machine (I got an old HP DL380 server off Ebay for AUD $60), getting firmware, installing linux, msdos and testing.

The funny thing is that it looks like HP never released 442 variation and so my board reports now as SAS3080 (8 internal).

I did see that there is a file that allows you to provide and override the SW configuration details that get loaded into NVP via "sasflash -o -concat IN.fw SPEC.dat OUT.fw" but I could not get this to work so it reported the correct 442 variation.

Also with this firmware variation you change whether it should act as RAID or HBA via the BIOS boot configuration rather than like in later BX / CX variations where you load in either RAID (-R) or IT (Initiator Target) (-IT) Firmware variations to manage mode of operation.

So it will be interesting to see if it works on Fuel or not. Here is boot into single user mode with 1068 Firmware version notice:




Because the SNAPHAT is dead I have to boot into single user mode and reset the date/time every time after I unplug Fuel from the power.
I have ordered enough SNAPHATs to go into all my O350 Chassis and the Fuel.

I will report back once I put disk in and test...

BTW I raised return request from Ebay seller as this board is obviously not right as you say and got refund.

I will use the $$ to find a BX / CX variation, which should avoid the firmware issues.

Cheers from Oz,


John.