Solved Sas card and mem

decuser

decuser

I recently installed a SAS controller (LSI-9207-8i pcie) into my new to me Lenovo Thincentre m92p. While doing so, I experienced 3 long and one short beeps from the POST. That’s supposedly a mem issue. I had 32 GB installed, so I removed one 8GB stick and the machine booted fine... with 24 GB.

I don’t really know storage stuff, so lemme ask if this is expected (does the mem on the card use up space that would normally be used for system ram)? The card has 8gb for cache and such, I think.
 
What brand was the SAS controller? If it is Lenovo branded, the BIOS *may* recognize it, and know its power requirements and cooling settings. The beeps from the POST *might* be the BIOS knowing that your system has too much power usage or requires more cooling. It *might* also be a warning that the BIOS has detected an unsupported/unknown card, and needs to restrict the power budget.

There is also a much simpler explanation: You had a loose contact or dirt on one of the RAMs. In that case, putting the last memory stick back in might actually work.

And the obvious possible explanation might be that there just isn't enough power for full memory and SAS card.

Anecdote: A few years ago, we were using IBM/Lenovo rackmount servers, and we installed a prototype SAS card in them. Unfortunately, the combination of older BIOS on the server, and prototype BIOS on the SAS card caused a situation where the cooling fans didn't know that the SAS card needed cooling. So the system tried to run. We were using the standard monitoring on the SAS card, and suddenly found that it failed. The log of the monitoring reported that the last temperature seen on the SAS chip was 106 degrees C (not F). When we got to the server room, it smelled like burned electronics, and the SAS card PC board was all brown around the chip. What do we learn from this? There is a good reason that motherboard BIOSes are well integrated with accessories like PCI cards.
 
According to Ericloewe over on the TrueNAS forum:

Some systems do some funky and dubious sharing of PCIe and DRAM I2C/SMBuses which can cause all sorts of weird and wonderful issues.

Since you don't actually need the SMBus for your SAS controller, see if you can disable it for the PCIe slot in your system firmware setup menu. I suspect that will fix your DRAM issue.
If it doesn't, then it's electrical and all bets are off.
Click to expand...
I did some digging on this basis and saw a thread where somebody was trying to use a Dell controller in a non-dell system that was not needing SMBus, so... I figured it might be related, more digging ensued and I found a thread with the LSI-9207-8i using the same fix. Some patient work with electrical tape, reading glasses, and an exacto knife got my two pins masked off - SBCLK and SBDAT (clock/data for SMBus). Popped that sucker back in along with my 32 GB RAM and everything's hunky dory :). No issues with my pools, vdevs, or bsd, yay!

The finished product, looked something like (just not a dell, same pins though):

4b0b9398be39fd766b9c2dc0d5224bebc950d585.jpeg
 
BTW, Ericloewe was just a little dubious at my solution - prolly not recommend for the faint of heart and surely no sysadmin would approve. Still it works. I told him if I was just a bit more hardcore, I could just remove those traces... but I'll stick with the tape, for now, pun intended.
 
Hello.
i have the same issue as this post. i tried the tape solution, and it stopped beeping at me, but now it seems to just hang.
i have an dell perc 710.
 
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