This is solved, by the way. I wanted to post this as, essentially, a knowledge base article.
Problem - Reinstalling Proxmox causes HBA connected drives to disappear.
Solution: There may be other problems, but the one that destroyed an entire afternoon for me (this afternoon, in fact) is that if you installed Proxmox in BIOS mode the first time, and UEFI mode the second time, then likely what is happening is that the boot ROM on your HBA card is loading in BIOS mode. If you launch ANY Linux kernel in UEFI mode, it can't talk to the HBA card , even though kernel finds it and it's in your 'lspci' output. I don't understand why, just that it's true. Boot ROMs on PCI cards can be launched in either Legacy BIOS mode or UEFI mode, and the OS has to be launched in the same mode to talk to the firmware on the cards with boot ROMs.
I know that this problem exists for Proxmox, but also Kubuntu, because in my wild scramble to try to solve this problem, I booted my server from a Kubuntu live disk and it couldn't see the disks either.
To fix the problem, you have to find EVERY setting in your BIOS/UEFI on the motherboard and set Boot ROMs or PCI ROMs to UEFI instead of Legacy. There may be several locations where you have to set this information - there was on my old board. In the Boot section of my BIOS/UEFI there was an option on the first page to set boot ROMs to "Prefer UEFI" or "Prefer BIOS". I changed that but it didn't work. So I rebooted and went into the BIOS/UEFI again, and looked at some sub-menus under the Boot section, and found two more settings that had to change from Legacy to UEFI. THEN when I rebooted Proxmox, it found my drives. Finally.
I suppose a second way to solve the problem is reinstall again, but boot the Linux/Proxmox installer in BIOS mode and proceed with the installation then. Whichever mode you use to boot the installer disk, it will install to a fixed disk in that mode as well.
Thanks go out to Calculagator on Redit for solving this nearly 7 years ago.
I was all over the place trying to find this information, tearing my hair out for hours, trying all kinds of configuration changes in my HBA. I hope you find it helpful.
(RAID controller disappear lost missing drives drive disk disks LSI HBA BIOS UEFI ROM boot)
Problem - Reinstalling Proxmox causes HBA connected drives to disappear.
Solution: There may be other problems, but the one that destroyed an entire afternoon for me (this afternoon, in fact) is that if you installed Proxmox in BIOS mode the first time, and UEFI mode the second time, then likely what is happening is that the boot ROM on your HBA card is loading in BIOS mode. If you launch ANY Linux kernel in UEFI mode, it can't talk to the HBA card , even though kernel finds it and it's in your 'lspci' output. I don't understand why, just that it's true. Boot ROMs on PCI cards can be launched in either Legacy BIOS mode or UEFI mode, and the OS has to be launched in the same mode to talk to the firmware on the cards with boot ROMs.
I know that this problem exists for Proxmox, but also Kubuntu, because in my wild scramble to try to solve this problem, I booted my server from a Kubuntu live disk and it couldn't see the disks either.
To fix the problem, you have to find EVERY setting in your BIOS/UEFI on the motherboard and set Boot ROMs or PCI ROMs to UEFI instead of Legacy. There may be several locations where you have to set this information - there was on my old board. In the Boot section of my BIOS/UEFI there was an option on the first page to set boot ROMs to "Prefer UEFI" or "Prefer BIOS". I changed that but it didn't work. So I rebooted and went into the BIOS/UEFI again, and looked at some sub-menus under the Boot section, and found two more settings that had to change from Legacy to UEFI. THEN when I rebooted Proxmox, it found my drives. Finally.
I suppose a second way to solve the problem is reinstall again, but boot the Linux/Proxmox installer in BIOS mode and proceed with the installation then. Whichever mode you use to boot the installer disk, it will install to a fixed disk in that mode as well.
Thanks go out to Calculagator on Redit for solving this nearly 7 years ago.
I was all over the place trying to find this information, tearing my hair out for hours, trying all kinds of configuration changes in my HBA. I hope you find it helpful.
(RAID controller disappear lost missing drives drive disk disks LSI HBA BIOS UEFI ROM boot)
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