Friday, June 21, 2013

IOMETER not showing all physical drives

I started to benchmark a new SSD only test SAN at work this week and after running several tests configuered in a RAID setup, I wanted to test the physical raw drives themselves. After deleting the partitions, I could not get the disks to show in IOMETER. The general solution to this is to run IOMETER as administrator under S2K8R2. This did not work for me, as the drives still had some partition reminants from the RAID. The solution: Use diskpart to clean the drives.

1) Open an Administrative CMD prompt- (right click CMD- run as administrator)

2) # diskpart

3) # select disk 1

4) # clean

Repeat until all the disks you want to test are clean. DO NOT CLEAN YOUR OS DISK.

5) # exit

Make sure IOMETER is being ran as administrator and all your disks should now show. Good luck!

Marc

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Flashing IT firmware on a LSI 9211-8i HBA from a USB stick

Recently I needed to test different firmware versions on some LSI 9211-8i PCI-E 8x SAS 6Gbps HBA's for work. Updating the firmware seemed like a momentus pain afer reviewing the plethra of guides online. Here is my simplifyed version:

Step 1: Download the HP Flash Utility and MS-DOS system files

LINK

Step 2: Install the HP Flash Utility and extract the MS-DOS system files


Step 3: Download the latest LSI firmware: 9211_8i_Package_P16_IR_IT_Firmware_BIOS_for_MSDOS_Windows

LINK

Step 4: Extract the LSI firmware zip.

 Step 5: Follow the great guide from the link in Step 1 on Seven Forums for creating your dos bootable USB thumb drive.

Step 6: Copy the following files from the LSI firmware package to your thumb drive.

2118it.bin - Under Firmware\HBA_9211_8I_IT
sas2flsh.exe - Under sas2flash_dos_rel
mptsas2.rom - Under sasbios_rel


Step 7: Plug your USB stick into the system you are flashing the 9211-8i controller in and boot off the thumb drive.

*IMPORTANT: DO NOT TRY TO FLASH MORE THEN (1) HBA CARD AT A TIME. Remove any additional controllers and repeat the next steps. You could perminatly brick multiple cards!*

Step 8: View the installed cards using # sas2flsh -listall
(Please ignore the onboard LSI 2308 controller)
 
Step 9: Delete the existing firmware # sas2flsh -o -e 6


Step 10: Update the firmware and bios # sas2flsh -f 2118it.bin -b mptsas2.rom

 All done!

 
There, that was not too bad. You can check the update by running # sas2flsh -listall and power cycle the machine- don't forget to remove the USB stick.
 
Marc