Added HBA card but no HDDs visible

Pretty simple - I am clueless noob and don’t have years to master Ubuntu, CLI and so on :slight_smile:
You know, some people do art and drawings, journalism and so on - we are not geeks, we barely mastered Windows to create LAN and not confuse SATA and USB ports :smiley:

I became a Chia fan, built a relatively big farm (have over 1PB of drives, with 50% filled and 50% not connected yet) - so I am trying to learn things… As you can see, I can’t even make HBA card work… Man, what do I say - it was a learning curve to set up 3 harvesters and make them all work :joy:

There are some ppl here with a lot of experience with this type of hardware but you might also try a more general hardware oriented forum.
Maybe better chance to find help with specific hardware setup

can you give an answer to Chia.Switzerland? In windows, when you connect the HBA with your drives, you will not see the drives at first. You have to go to Device Manager and start initialize the Drives and format them after. Did you take these actions? Because maybe your HBA is working but you did not take these actions by thinking you would see the drives automatically.

if it is addressed to me - of course I did go there, I plugged a lot of internal HDDs and always went through initialization first.
but in this case I don’t see them there, although again, I see my card.

Can you simply boot a ubuntu live system and check if it’s working there?
Linux is a lot easier to debug from remote as you can send outputs of some commands that reveals anything about hw, errors and there like… And you wouldn’t have to install a driver as everything is included by default in a ubuntu live system.
If it’s not working on ubuntu, open up a shell and provide us the output of sudo dmesg as first starting point.
Ubuntu with desktop isn’t much harder than windows.

Hi @ Shmoe,

This HBA card LSI 9201-16e, I think is a little old. Could you check to see if you have the latest drivers from Broadcom? Also it would be good to check the compatibility report for this card. I made a search for you, so you can check it here : MegaRAID SAS Value_Feature_6Gb/s Interoperability Matrix (broadcom.com)
If nothing works, maybe you will have to get a newest HBA. In my case, I am using the Broadcom 9500-16e 12Gb/s HBA Trimode SAS/NVMe.
I don’t know what to tell you more as we can’t check your configuration.

I will need to google ‘how to install ubuntu’ and ‘can you run windows and ubuntu on the same machine’ :slight_smile:

but I got your point, need to make them work, even jbods need to be connected through those anyways :expressionless:

Hey, ‘using’ like what? Just plug n play on Win10? Would be awesome. Yeah, I know they are old, but were also cheap, like $40 each… So, not biggie if they turn out to be useless for me. I’m googling now how to install latest firmware right now on them, although seller rest assured me they have latest drivers, plus if Device Manager detects those without any issues - I think they are working, right?

You can start here: Finding the latest software for your controller (broadcom.com) and search for your 9201-16e. I think you will have to update the firmware and the bios for the HBA.
After making a search using “9201-16e”, I have this link with the specific documentation and the Bios, Driver and Firmware for your HBA: Support Documents and Downloads (broadcom.com)

Hope this helps you.

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  1. Download Ubuntu ISO here.
  2. Download Rufus. You can use it to create an Ubuntu USB drive from the ISO above.
  3. Plug in the drive and reboot into your BIOS. Choose the boot priority to the drive you just plugged in. Then save the change and reboot again. Your PC will boot into the Ubuntu installation screen.
  4. Hit next/continue until you see the screen where it asks you whether you would like to install Ubuntu alongside Windows.

The rest of the process should be obvious.

Do not follow any guides on the internet. Most of that will lead you complications and will most likely create problems later on if you’re not familiar with Linux yet. Just follow the official instructions in the installer and you will be fine.

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You can also only boot ubuntu from the install media instead of installing it to your hdd alongside windows!

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