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etherfish · 09-27-2008, 02:09 PM

This is my first post and I apologise, but I've never used forums much. Please let me know if I fail to observe any appropriate etiquette.

I've got a Snap 520 with four 1TB drives. Specifically, they're ST31000340AS. Unfortunately, we've been frustated that it will hang on boot while running the Broadcom HT-1000 option rom. Since the machine uses a usb flash drive for it's root filesystem, the crude workaround we've devised is to pull all four drives out about half a centimeter - enough to disconnect them form the backplane until we reach the linux grub screen. At the grub screen, we reinsert the drives and then boot the kernel. The kernel has no problem detecting the drives. We're also not concerned about inserting the drives while the system is live - previous inspection revelead that the the snap 520 actually has a hotplug SAS backplane.

With regards to the hang on boot, I would be keenly interested to know if your snap hangs at the same place in the boot process. To reduce the noise of the fans, I upgraded the bios on our snap from the one it had to the most recent, generic supermicro bios, specifically dspr6306.rom dated 6/30/2006. I was concerned that i'd broken my snap with the new bios. Does your snap hang if the ht-1000 sata is set to "RAID" mode in the bios instead of IDE or MMIO? Our will in a way that requires clearing the cmos and I can't recall if it worked before the bios upgrade either.

One last clue regarding the boot failure. The machine had no issues booting when the drives were first installed new and before a partition table had been written to them. I'm beginning to suspect a bug in the ht-1000's option rom master boot record parser. One of these days I mean to migrate the disks to GPT hoping it will avoid the bug and allow the machine to boot normally.

09-27-2008, 02:09 PM	#8
etherfish Cooling Neophyte Join Date: Sep 2008 Location: Norfolk, VA Posts: 5	Re: Snap 520 question This is my first post and I apologise, but I've never used forums much. Please let me know if I fail to observe any appropriate etiquette. I've got a Snap 520 with four 1TB drives. Specifically, they're ST31000340AS. Unfortunately, we've been frustated that it will hang on boot while running the Broadcom HT-1000 option rom. Since the machine uses a usb flash drive for it's root filesystem, the crude workaround we've devised is to pull all four drives out about half a centimeter - enough to disconnect them form the backplane until we reach the linux grub screen. At the grub screen, we reinsert the drives and then boot the kernel. The kernel has no problem detecting the drives. We're also not concerned about inserting the drives while the system is live - previous inspection revelead that the the snap 520 actually has a hotplug SAS backplane. With regards to the hang on boot, I would be keenly interested to know if your snap hangs at the same place in the boot process. To reduce the noise of the fans, I upgraded the bios on our snap from the one it had to the most recent, generic supermicro bios, specifically dspr6306.rom dated 6/30/2006. I was concerned that i'd broken my snap with the new bios. Does your snap hang if the ht-1000 sata is set to "RAID" mode in the bios instead of IDE or MMIO? Our will in a way that requires clearing the cmos and I can't recall if it worked before the bios upgrade either. One last clue regarding the boot failure. The machine had no issues booting when the drives were first installed new and before a partition table had been written to them. I'm beginning to suspect a bug in the ht-1000's option rom master boot record parser. One of these days I mean to migrate the disks to GPT hoping it will avoid the bug and allow the machine to boot normally.