Hi guys
I have the Dell r710
with latest bios (6.4) and firmware
I also have 2 Samsung 850 Evo drives in the Harddrive Enclosures
I have the LSI 9207 4i4e installed in the non integrated PCI Slots
The LSI 9207 4i4e is on Firmware is version 18
Upon boot the LSI HBA is recognized and and enabled and the 2 Samsung 850 Evo are recognized by the LSI HBA card. I have also formatted the Evo drives in the HBA Config utility (Ctrl C) and made the SSDs bootable
In Dell r710 bios I have also disabled the perc6i integrated controller which came with the server.
Unplugged all the cables to perc6i(The perc6i is still in its integrated slot though)
and the SAS A and B backplanes are connected with appropriate cables to the LSI 9207 4i4e (one 8087 to 8087 (SASB backplane ) cable to LSI card internal slot and one 8087 to 8088 (SAS A Backplane) to LSI external slot.
I have selected UEFI booting so I can install windows server 2012 which is located on USB stick.
The system boots into the windows install files and allows me the build a primary partition on one of the SSDs to install windows too. Everything seems to proceed fine and windows goes into its customary reboot of the server to finalize the installation.
But this is where I hit upon a snag.
Upon reboot the expectation is that windows boots from SSD's connected to the LSI HBA, but unfortunatly it just goes straight back into the USB running the windows installation again. So I enter the Dell UEFI menu and see if i can select the windows boot partition, but unfornately the Dell UEFI says its' uavailable windows boot partiion' and is not selectable
I know this should all work because I originally had samsung 850 evos connected to the perc6i and windows server installed without hitch and i was able to login to windows and see the SSDs under a raid virtual volume.
So i dont if if anybody out can get this working with the 9207 4i4e. My main reasons for going with this card is according to LSI's documentation on their website, this card has been tested and is compatiable with Dell r710's servers and samsung 850 evos. I wanted to take advantage of higher 6GB speed that the LSI 9207 offers over the perc 6i.
Any ideas from anybody out there would be really helpful.
Also I do realise that Samsung 850 Evo are probably not certified with dell r710 as they are consumer grade and the dell 710 is an old server. But I was able to get this working with the perc6i but the read and write speeds were very slow. I know the alternatives are the H700 and maybe H710 percs. But if I could get 9207 4i4e to work It would be great.
Thank you again John
Dell r710
(2CPU Xeon X5660, 48GB, 870 watt PSU)