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Topic: Booting problems with SAS adapter installed. (Read 465 times) previous topic - next topic
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Booting problems with SAS adapter installed.

This problem may be only related to this particular hardware configuration, so I will list it here:
Asus KCMA-D8 motherboard https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/asus-kcma-d8
dual Opteron 4386
64GB DDR3-1600 in 8x8 LRDIMMs
250GB SSD attached to the motherboard's native SATA-1 port with Artix installed
SAS card: Asus PIKE-2008 (essentially a LSISAS 2008 in a special form factor for this motherboard, but otherwise nothing special) with IT firmware, and any drive attached to any of its 8 SAS ports.

I installed Artix as per usual from USB using the 8/2024 boot release. Nothing special about that. I did not have the SAS card installed during that process. Boots fine and works as expected after install.

Plugged in SAS card, boots fine, I can see the SAS card with lspci and verify that the mpt3sas module is automatically loaded. All good.

Attached a drive to the SAS card, using any of its SAS channels. At boot, I get the grub menu, but after that the boot process stalls after "loading ramdisk". Video output becomes blank and the system is unresponsive. Tried many SAS disks and ports, it's all the same.

With SAS drive still attached I plugged in the USB drive, went to BIOS and adjusted the boot options so it boots from USB again. It does give me the grub boot menu from the USB, but after selecting either the CDROM or the USB option (both of which worked previously without issue) it fails to boot. Video turns off and the system is unresponsive.

Removed the SAS drive, left the SAS card plugged (this configuration works for booting from Artix already installed). But trying to boot like this from USB results in the same behavior as above: after the menu, no video and unresponsive.

I think that somehow grub becomes confused when the SAS controller +/- any attached drives are present, but without being able to boot from USB at all when the SAS card is present I don't know how to proceed and diagnose this further.

Re: Booting problems with SAS adapter installed.

Reply #1 –
"loading ramdisk" most likely means you have reached the initial ramdisk created by mkinitcpio. This detects the required modules when it's created so you might need to make a new one with everything connected, either using mkinitcpio directly or just reinstall the kernel which will also run that. If it boots OK with the fall back kernel then it's probably a module issue, although there are some modules which are not present by default and need to be installed as separate packages. But as you can't boot from a USB then the fallback image might not help here.
If you take "quiet" off the kernel command line by editing the line at the grub menu and add "rd.debug" then you should get more info about where it's stopping, you can use a video camera if any interesting bits scroll off the screen before it stops, but it might help you without. You can also potentially save logs in text form if it doesn't stop too soon, the mkinitcpio man page has a few more details.

Re: Booting problems with SAS adapter installed.

Reply #2 –
So I haven't had time to work on this for a little while.
I came back to this project today, noticed there was a new kernel released; I installed that and let it rebuild the initrd for the new kernel, and rebooted.
That actually made things worse.
Now it behaves like trying to boot from the Artix install USB: after the GRUB screen it gets to "loading ramdisk" and then video turns off and the system becomes totally unresponsive. No response from keyboard, even ctrl-alt-del doesn't do anything, and needs a hard power off. That is with the SAS card installed but no drives attached.