GA-X58A-UD9 and LSI MegaRAID 9240-8i

[zee3are0]

No matter what devices I have in my computer, or what slot I put the LSI MegaRAID 9240-8i in, it will never boot into Windows - always with the "No physical memory is available at the location required to load the Windows Boot Manager. The system can not continue."

Can't even install Windows. My system drives are SAS drives, so there is no other way, besides an SAS card, to interface them to the system.

I've heard about GigaByte boards not working with devices other than video cards in the PCI-E 16x slots, but I have the LSI card in an 8x slot.

Any help?

 

[jaquith]

Did you "pre-install" the RAID drivers? The simplest is a Floppy install otherwise I use nLiteOS to create an installer DVD. http://www.nliteos.com/

 

[zee3are0]

Won't get that far. I can't even get to the point of loading any drivers.

 

[jaquith]

The LSI MegaRAID 9240 is a very poorly rated RAID controller to begin with and a lot of people have been having all sorts of problems with that card. My recommendation is to replace it with an Adaptec controller - I am leery to recommend one over another to anyone especially sub-$600 controllers. It all depends upon what particular RAID you want to use - simple RAID 1 or 0 require nearly no processing, but 5 and any complex stripe is another story - plus I can only recommend controllers with large caches to use battery backup.

As I understand it, you have not installed Windows and during installation you cannot F6 the RAID drivers. If so then replace the RAID controller.

Q - why a SAS on a non-Xeon rig??

Help - http://www.lsi.com/channel/products/megaraid/sassata/9240-8i/index.html

 

[warpete]

I'm not exactly sure WHY you seem to think that the LSI card is so poorly rated. It is NOT poorly rated whatsoever! Of all the ratings I have seen, the card does exceptionally well. I have an LSI 9240-8i card controlling 4 Crucial 128GB C300 SSD's (SATA 3 - 6Gbps) in a RAID 0 and my benckmark results get close to the $3000.00+ FusionIO PCIe cards. This particular LSI card has no onboard cache but I don't really need it with SSD's. You mention "sub-$600 controller"---I picked up my LSI card on eBay for $150.00 and as far as a "non-Xeon rig" is concerned---why not? It is a SAS/SATA III controller card which leaves a person with a choice as to what HDD's they can choose from depending on intented use. I have an Intel 980X CPU on an Asus Rampage III Extreme board and along with the four SATA III SSD's in RAID 0, I am lightening fast. I would even be OK using the onboard Intel ICH10R chipset for RAID 0, but the SATA III Marvell controller can NOT handle RAID whatsoever. So, anyone with this Asus board and SATA III devices needs to find a solution OTHER than the Marvell controller----and the LSI 9240-8i works perfectly. I've not had one single problem.

 

[warpete]

No matter what devices I have in my computer, or what slot I put the LSI MegaRAID 9240-8i in, it will never boot into Windows - always with the "No physical memory is available at the location required to load the Windows Boot Manager. The system can not continue."

Can't even install Windows. My system drives are SAS drives, so there is no other way, besides an SAS card, to interface them to the system.

I've heard about GigaByte boards not working with devices other than video cards in the PCI-E 16x slots, but I have the LSI card in an 8x slot.

Any help?

I would suggest that you contact LSI support directly. I have seen others with problems associated with Gigabyte boards, and I have also seen them get their problems resolved. I would go directly to the source before you simply "replace the RAID controller".

 

[deMarchi]

zee3are0 , I have the same proble with XFX 780i mb. More over I have 9240-4i and ibm m1015 cards. Both of them report the same message. (ibm m1015 is clone of 9240-8i but with activation key for raid level 5). so, it seems the problem in lsi bios or whole card. Have you fixed it already? thanks!

 

[deMarchi]

added: I have no problem on Intel worksatation board s5520sc

 

[Guest]

I would suggest that you contact LSI support directly. I have seen others with problems associated with Gigabyte boards, and I have also seen them get their problems resolved. I would go directly to the source before you simply "replace the RAID controller".

I have called LSI to ask if their card was compatible with the x58a ud3r v.2 and the tech guy told me that they do not offer any compatibility testing on any non server class mobo. He went on to tell me that ever though there is a pci-e standard, and it should work, that any mobo that is set up for sli or crossfire particularly have issues running pci raid cards because the mobo companies tweak their bios to offer better sli/crossfire performance.

I have also called gigabyte and when I got through to the tech, he told me that he hadn't heard of anyone having problems, and he said that he thinks he heard of someone using an adaptec raid card and it working. When I asked about the non video card in pci-e he said that he hasn't heard of it.

I really wanted to use the x58a ud3r with an lsi 9260-4i but I don't think that it will work since the ud3r is basically a stripped down ud9.

I have heard from a few people that LSI raid cards work on asus p6t deluxe v.2 with about 400mb read/write. can anyone confirm this?

Lsi's US phone number is 1 800 372 2447 and gigabyte's is 1 626 9338l. I suggest bugging them about the issue.

 

[zee3are0]

Ultimately, solution was simple - ditched LSI. The next card that came in, a HighPoint RocketRAID 2720 worked great straight out of the box. System is up, reliable, and blazing fast.

I had also tried the IBM M1015 - in fact, I had that first. Never worked. In short, LSI and GigaByte in this respect were apparently fatally incompatible. Not sure if the problem is GigaByte in doing something with the BIOS - the GA-X58A-UD9 is certainly an optimized board - but it wasn't too much tweaking with the BIOS as I put the HighPoint card into any open slot and it worked fine.

 

[spooky2th]

I have a Silicon Image SiI 3124 SoftRaid 5 Controller in my GA-EX58-UD3R-SLI board. It was easy to set up and gives really fast RW speeds with SATA 1 & 2 drives.

 

[tiro_uspsss]

Ultimately, solution was simple - ditched LSI. The next card that came in, a HighPoint RocketRAID 2720 worked great straight out of the box. System is up, reliable, and blazing fast.

I had also tried the IBM M1015 - in fact, I had that first. Never worked. In short, LSI and GigaByte in this respect were apparently fatally incompatible. Not sure if the problem is GigaByte in doing something with the BIOS - the GA-X58A-UD9 is certainly an optimized board - but it wasn't too much tweaking with the BIOS as I put the HighPoint card into any open slot and it worked fine.

soooo I take it you didn't get the LSI & GB working together like you said you did:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itproinstall/thread/8e8e6ca1-1814-4848-8cde-f0b380a0a265/

 

[gordon1]

I'm not exactly sure WHY you seem to think that the LSI card is so poorly rated. It is NOT poorly rated whatsoever! Of all the ratings I have seen, the card does exceptionally well. I have an LSI 9240-8i card controlling 4 Crucial 128GB C300 SSD's (SATA 3 - 6Gbps) in a RAID 0 and my benckmark results get close to the $3000.00+ FusionIO PCIe cards. This particular LSI card has no onboard cache but I don't really need it with SSD's. You mention "sub-$600 controller"---I picked up my LSI card on eBay for $150.00 and as far as a "non-Xeon rig" is concerned---why not? It is a SAS/SATA III controller card which leaves a person with a choice as to what HDD's they can choose from depending on intented use. I have an Intel 980X CPU on an Asus Rampage III Extreme board and along with the four SATA III SSD's in RAID 0, I am lightening fast. I would even be OK using the onboard Intel ICH10R chipset for RAID 0, but the SATA III Marvell controller can NOT handle RAID whatsoever. So, anyone with this Asus board and SATA III devices needs to find a solution OTHER than the Marvell controller----and the LSI 9240-8i works perfectly. I've not had one single problem.

I'm glad to hear you were successful using a non-server rig and a LSI 9240. I too am about to buld a similar rig with a Azrock Extreme3 Gen3 with a I7 2600k CPU and 8 120gb Agility 3 SSD's. No real reasoning outside of it's a hobby. I am a little concerned with the initial boot up. One blog stated I need to boot off another hdd that has windows on it before I can configure the raid card, any suggestions?
Gordon

 

[rezoloot]

I've got the lsi 9240-8i on my dell precision and do not have a single problem, but here is why, My board is the omy171, it has three pci-e x8 slots that are also compatible and wired for x4 and x2, the problem I think your having with your board is that, the pci-e x16 slots are probably not wired as an 8, check all your slots and look for one that is wired as a x8, it clearly states on the documentation that the card will fail without the x8 power

As for booting, I boot all my drives in raid 1 and 5 at the same time, no spinup delay, I have a dell 750 watt psu but I've metered it and it pushes out more like 900-950 (not tried to run at full for a long time to see what it can do, because I like it hehe),

Installation
Make a "MR_4.11_Complete_Code_Set_V0-001" dvd with all the drivers, firmware, power off, install the card, start up and ALT H into web bios, create the raid configurations and then select the drive(s) you want as the boot disk/drive, then instal win os to your boot drive, oila

Hope this is useful