PCIe slot on my ZimaBlade won't properly initialize a LSI HBA card

Hardware ZimaBlade
1

Hey all, hoping someone from the team or another owner has run into this.

Short version: I’ve tried two different SAS2008-based HBAs in my ZimaBlade’s PCIe slot (one LSI-branded, one a Dell PERC H310) and both hit the same wall. At first neither card would even show up in lspci at all — completely invisible on the bus. After a lot of back and forth with the BIOS settings I got the H310 to actually enumerate, but now it fails during driver init with:

mpt2sas_cm0: sending diag reset !!
mpt2sas_cm0: Invalid host diagnostic register value
mpt2sas_cm0: diag reset: FAILED
mpt2sas_cm0: failure at drivers/scsi/mpt3sas/mpt3sas_scsih.c:12349/_scsih_probe()!

Card shows up fine in lspci (01:00.0 Serial Attached SCSI controller: Broadcom / LSI SAS2008... [Falcon]), gets a PCI address, BARs get assigned — it just dies at this diagnostic register handshake every single time.

What I’ve ruled out so far:

  • Power: tried a Molex-powered PCIe riser to inject supplemental 12V straight into the slot. No change at all.
  • Riser/signal path: pulled the riser entirely and ran the card straight in the slot. Identical failure either way.
  • BIOS PCIe link speed: went through all four root port entries in Chipset > South Cluster Config > PCI Express Configuration and forced each to Gen 1 instead of Auto, one at a time with a cold boot between each. No change.
  • Firmware: reflashed the H310 clean with verified P20 IT-mode firmware via sas2flash.efi from a UEFI shell. Confirmed post-flash with -listall — clean 20.00.07.00, product ID 0x2213 (IT). Same diag reset failure persists on the freshly flashed card.
  • Card itself: tested two completely different cards (different manufacturers, same SAS2008 chip) — same result both times, which rules out one specific card being bad.
  • Tested on two OSes: CasaOS (stock Debian base) and Unraid. Same result on both, so it’s not a driver/OS issue.

At this point everything I can control has come back clean except the slot itself. Wondering if anyone else has actually gotten a SAS/RAID HBA working in a ZimaBlade’s PCIe slot, or if this is a known issue with certain board revisions.

Specs: ZimaBlade 7700, BIOS ZMB V1.0, currently running Unraid 7.3.2.

Happy to provide more logs/photos if it helps.

2

I have managed to test the 9300-4i (IBM M1210), 9305-24i (OCP MR3226) and both the 9400-16E and 16i variants and they have all worked flawlessly with the Zimaboard 2. Unfortunately, I don’t have a Zimablade to test it out but I’d suspect it could be insuficient airflow (remember they need high LFM).

How are the HBA LEDs? Are they blinking green as expected? What about BIOS/UEFI, do they show up correctly at setup and can you see the drives?

3

Thanks for the quick reply!

The card appears to be alive: has a power LED and blinking channel indicator, but the individual disk activity LEDs never light. And I didnt think about cooling, however I have this just sitting on my work bench currently with no case so while it does not have active cooling, it is not enclosed.

BIOS/UEFI do not show the drives at all. Only the built in storage and whatever USB I have plugged in at the time.

4

Having proper airflow to an HBA, specially older models such as the SAS2008, is mandatory to avoid silicon damage. Literally every HBA expect at least 110+ LFM (Lineard Feet per Minute) as they’re designed for enterprise and datacenter scenarios. If you’re picky about things you can print a proper fan shroud to your HBA model, if you don’t give a damn you can just zip tie a 60mm fan to the heatsink and you should be good.

Moreover, all of the symptoms you’ve described are typical of HBA overheating due to poor cooling so all of that checks out.

Here is what a nice shroud looks like:

image
image1920×1920 351 KB

Here is what a simple cooling approach looks like:

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image720×540 143 KB

5

Having exactly the same issue, but only SAS2008 based cards, particularly the ones with external ports (8e). I have no issues initializing other variants (SAS2308) following the guidance here: How to configure an HBA to be recognised by a ZimaBoard