Proxmox won't boot with SATA drives inserted via LSI SAS 3008 IT

[fsociety3765]

Hi all,

Is there something I need to do to make this card work with Proxmox? I have just flashed the firmware on the SAS card to the latest (16.00.10). It's running in IT mode. At the moment, I have inserted 8x SATA drives and if I boot into the SAS configuration utility it sees all the drives. But when I exit the utility Proxmox will not boot up anymore. I just get a black screen. If I shut down and remove all the drives, Proxmox boot ups fine. And if I run lspci on the command line it lists the LSI 3008 card. Just seems as soon as I plug in a drive it doesn't like it.

Ultimately I will be using PCI passthrough to pass this whole card directly to a TrueNas VM so I haven't installed any drivers for the card in the Proxmox installation. Should I need to do this for Proxmox to boot up with drives installed perhaps?

The actual card is a Supermicro AOC-S3008L-L8e.

Thanks,

FS

 

[fsociety3765]

Bit of an update. Unplugged all the drives, booted up Proxmox, and then plugged in just one drive which is a brand new and unused drive.

On the command line, it shows up as /dev/sde running lsblk. But if I try to look at the disks in the Proxmox UI, it spins and then times out. I can't seem to run cfdisk on it. It just freezes. I can just about get into fdisk and it gave me a warning. I didn't take a screenshot but it was something about not supporting DOS partition tables and said to create a GPT partition table, so I did that a wrote the changes. It still shows up in lsblk but the disk menu in the UI still just times out. I tried doing a reboot and Proxmox wouldn't boot again.

I'm now assuming this brand new disk may be faulty. I have plugged in three other identical disks that were in use before and were working. All still in warranty. But Proxmox will not boot.

I can accept maybe one disk being faulty, even it is brand new. But 4 faulty disks...? I must be doing something wrong haha. The three I have plugged in currently were previously in use in a Qnap NAS drive as a RAID6. But since that unit failed, I have erased and tested each drive before re-using them. Is there anything I need to do to prepare these disks for use with Proxmox or just Linux in general? All the drives I removed from my old Qnap are WD Red 6TB and I used the WD Diagnostic Tool within Windows 10 to erase and test each of them so I'm not sure if that has perhaps done something to the disk that makes them incompatible with Linux.

 

[bobmc]

Doesn't look as if this controller is Debian friendly, official support is for RedHat and SUSE - see here
https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/lsi3008-sas3-controller.3417/

 

[fsociety3765]

The card mentioned in that thread is the 3008L-L8i variant.

The card I have is the 3008L-L8e. I did do some research beforehand and I'm fairly sure people are using this card with Proxmox successfully as I was advised to get it to replace the RAID card that came with the server by someone with the same use case. I think that was on the Lawrence Systems forum.

Looking at lspci -v I can see there is the correct kernel driver loaded. I'm not sure if it's the latest version of the driver though. I suppose I could try running the latest driver install and see if it make a difference.

 

[fsociety3765]

OK, so I think I am going to give up on this for now. I can't get it to work so I have uninstalled the card for now. I even tried booting to a live Ubuntu USB to see if I could play around with the disks in GParted and not even Ubuntu would boot with the disks inserted.

As I won't be using it with Proxmox directly, it's not a huge deal right now. The real test will be if it all works once passed through to a TrueNas VM. And just as a backup, I have purchased a Broadcom SAS 9300-8I HBA.