Guys - Please check my consolidated thread in my signature. I've got a whole slew of HDAMA-G BIOS'es there.
Hi all, have been reading this forum after purchasing a few of these Motherboards from Charles Computers on Ebay. But unfortunately cannot install Windows Server 2008 because of BSOD about ACPI. I have installed Windows Server 2003 which works fine, but want Server 2008. My system is as follows. 2U Rackable Systems Case Arima RioWorks Motherboard, think its Rev G Dual Core Opteron 252 2.6GHZ 64Bit x 2 3 x 500GB SATA II Drives in RAID 5 3ware 9500S RAID Controller as Motherboard has not got in built in. 4 GB 333MHZ Memory, 2 in each CPU Bank 1.44mb Floppy DVD ROM Drive When the system boots, it says its Bios 2.13 RE4 for Rackable - What do I need to upgrade from here. Can anyone please do a proper new list step by step as I cannot figure it out and dont want to brick my board. Moving into new office next week and need server working for then. So all your help is much appeciated. What is PowerNow and do I need it? also the SLIC part do I need to do that? sorry for being such a noob. Also any ideas on what best partition sizes would be for my system, only going to be for exchange/file sharing/remote access. Thanks John
Forgot to also say, on the 3ware 9500S Raid Board, the bios on that is currently 2.08.00.08 does that need updating to support Server 2008 or is it ok? Thanks again
Arima HDAMA G USB boot Hiya, I have updated my bios and raid chip. I was just looking to see if there is a way to get this board to boot from usb. Cheers, Raj
Not sure if it's in the HDAMA-G v2.17, but others have reported it to work with the v2.18 BIOS. Please search the thread in my signature for those discussing booting from USB.
ok for iscsi Hi all, i'm wondering if these would be suitable for running as iscsi storage servers ? any advice? zac
Creating a raid Hiya, I upgraged a box to bios 2.18 and sil image 5.5 When i go in the raid controller, I can create raids 1,5,10,0 though when try to install vmware it sees all my drive as individual drives. I tried with raid 5 and raid 1. Any suggestions please Raj
VMware ESXi has a limited HCL. I don't believe it supports software/fake-RAID devices like the SI 3114 and it just sees them as individual SATA devices (like Linux normally does). I usually use 3ware cards, but even my 9500S is not supported out of the box unless I rebuild the ISO with a custom driver. Ditto for the 9550SX card too. Seems 3ware/LSI only certified the PCI-express cards.
Hi All, I've been following this thread for sometime now (and tqhoang's other thread for the bios'es on these boards which I must say a big thanks for...) I'm adding a post to explain my own experiences running Windows Server 2008 on one of these (Also from Charles Computers) and to ask if anyone can think of a way out of my current predicament. I installed windows 2008 on to my system just under a year ago, I initially tried 2008r2 but after a disastrous 2 days I gave up and went back to 2008. This was however after I'd updated my Bios to 1.23 - RE2 with sata link 5.5.00 which I needed so that the server would see the 1Tb segate barracuda I'd installed in it. In general I had none of the problems above with ACPI, Powernow and other stuff described above and for the most part things would run smoothly the ONLY issue I had was the random lock up's and these where very random (although I could force them sometimes with lots of heavy disk-IO) , I could be sitting working away one moment and the next the system was dead in the water. No reboots, No blue screen no error's or exceptions and nothing in the event logs when restarted. After restart sometimes it may only last an hour or two, but a lot of the time would run for weeks / months then out of the blue would just lock again for no reason. Anyway It was ok as a dev server (my main use) but recently I wanted to re-purpose it for another use (as a PostgreSQL DB server) and as a result wanted to see if I could make it more stable. After coming back here and reading up on the latest posts, I found the new 2.18 Bios was available so I decided to give it a try. After following the "Readme_218.txt" for the HDAMA v2.18 Bios I did as suggested and upgraded to the original bios first with a view to rebooting then running the appropriate bios to get my raid working. The re-flash went smoothly and no errors where reported and I rebooted when requested but now when the board is booted it refuses to try and boot from any device attached to it. In the boot order menu in the Bios all I now have is "Removable Devices" & "Hard Drive" , no matter which IDE hard drive I hook up even though the main bios screen recognises it correctly, NOTHING appears in the hard drives list in the boot menu (you can usually expand it to show all drives) I've tried Booting from IDE CD / DVD and from several IDE hard drives ranging from an old 30 Mb MFM right through to a 2tb 7200 Western digital, I've tried various sizes & types of Sata Drive with no joy, various USB devices & key chains I've even tried various floppy drives and all the board does is complain that every one of them is faulty and that I should press F1 to continue (Two of the floppy's I know work fine) I've tried various combinations of cables, power connectors etc. etc. and even a network boot, but the bios now doesn't even seem to want to try a netboot either (That is I don't see the network option rom even load) even though as with everything else the network card is detected in the bios settings. I've fiddled about changing different settings in the bios as well as trying proper bios resets with the jumper on the board and restore default settings options, and still no joy. I'm now at the point where everything looks pretty bleak, and I have a dual opteron 270 board that won't do anything else except load it's bios settings. If however anyone here has any suggestions for anything I may have missed or could try to bring this back on-line then I'd be grateful, otherwise it's off the Charles computers I go to buy a new board....
Thanks tqhoang I'll try that. My board however as marked on it in white paint that it's a HDAMA Rev G and not a Rev I Will this still work even though the bios keeps telling me that the floppy drive is faulty? No matter what floppy / cable combo I use all I get is the bios telling me what ever is plugged in cannot be used, and it doesn't even try to load the floppy boot sector. At least I know there may be some hope for it. Regards Shawty
You've confused me now. Didn't you say that you had BIOS v1.23 on there? That's an HDAMA-I BIOS. It's quite possible that Arima re-used the PCB but made it an HDAMA-I instead. Anyway, good luck with the Phoenix Crisis Recovery. Another option would be for you to buy a BIOS chip off eBay or somewhere and have it pre-flashed with the HDAMA-I BIOS v1.23.
It was the opposite. He said he ran the v1.23 BIOS for a while w/o any problems other than lockups. Then he flashed the v2.18 BIOS and it didn't boot anymore.
tqhoang is correct, i didn't explain quite correctly The reason I tried to flash the v2.18 bios is because I thought the board was a rev-g board, the reason I thought it was a rev-g is because it has "Rev G" marked on the motherboard. With the help you guys have provided here I now know that it is in fact a Rev-I and NOT a Rev-G Couple with that I've also compared board diagrams to both manuals and it is definitely a Rev-I UPDATE Ok I'm getting somewhere .... BUT the only device I've managed to get to boot is a Linux Hard drive. sooooooo.... my next question Does anyone know of a linux version of "phlash16.exe" UPDATE 2 Anything that is *NOT* ms-dos boot based seems to boot either from HDD or USB-Key, anything dos based will not, EG: dos 6.22 formatted hdd or a keychain with the arima rom boot image on.
Hi All, Well after a long day of wrestling with the server I finally managed to recover it and get the V1.23 Bios back in and running. For reference and to any who may also hit this problem here's how I eventually managed it. Firstly I downloaded the Phoenix Crisis Disk (as tqhoang advised me to do so above) I ran this on a 2gb Cruzer Micro USB Key after first copying the Bios I wanted to the folder where I'd unpacked the program, and renaming it to 'bios.wph'. This is required purely and simply to allow the program to function correctly under windows. Note also that you will need to right click the app and 'Run as Administrator' in order to make it work correctly. With this key-chain I then disconnected ALL bootable devices from the server, and inserted just the key-chain into USB slot 1, the server was then powered up. (Note: previous to this point NOTHING would boot on the server at all) The Boot loader created by the crisis disk software kicked in displaying the message: Phoenix Crisis Recovery Disk Remove Device and press any key to continue Following the instructions, I was faced with 'Operating system not found' scrolling up the screen I tried again, this time leaving the key in, but repeatedly saw the phoenix message every-time I pressed the key. After seeing the server boot off a device (the key-chain) for the first time in over a week, I tried another hard drive I'd previously been using to attempt to boot from, this drive contained a Linux installation and the boot-loader had been created using Grub rather than I tradition DOS based boot block that would look for 'IBMIO.SYS' or similar. Much to my surprise, the OS started to load, and within a minute or so the system was up and running under Ubuntu Linux. This was a major achievement, but still a way to go, given that the actual server drive was a windows install. Given that I now had the confidence that the system would (and could) be made to boot I set about trying to get one of the Bios CD images and/or a standard dos command line to boot so that I could run 'phlash16.exe' to reprogram the ROM. (This was after first trying to see if I could find a Linux binary to run, without success) Every attempt I made at loading a dos based OS (That is one that used 'io.sys' and/or 'ibmio.sys' plus a command interpreter) failed in some way, either by a hang at boot, or a failure to load the primary command interpreter. Every alternate I tried, Grub, ISOLinux and so on all worked without issue but left me in a position where I was not able to run the flash tool. My personal belief is that the DOS based systems where all attempting to use the INT13h Bios functions for IO and because of the bad ROM where failing, where as the alternate boot loaders where all by-passing INT 13h and so able to load successfully. My plan of action at this point changed from trying to use a loader that boots, in order to launch an environment that would load the flash tools. I eventually ended up downloading the Ultimate Boot CD and then customised it as shown here, before using the tools provided to create a customised version that contained the ISO images provided in tqhoang's bios collection. This did prove to be a little tricky as the command shown on the UBC site to make a bootable USB key doesn't quite work as they describe it. They state that you can use a path to the files unpacked from a UBC disk, which makes sense as you would copy the contents, add your customisations, then run the command to make the bootable key. In practice what I found was, I had to make the customisations, then using an ISO editing program copy those customisations into the actual UBCD iso image. This image was then mounted in a virtual CD drive and the command to create the key-chain run against just the drive letter 'x:' rather than the full path 'x:\foo\bar\' The result of this was a bootable USB key, that booted using an alternate loader which bypasses the INT 13h services, from the menu I was then able to pick the customised ISO images from tqhoang and find that it was now possible to boot those images to a command line, where I was able to run 'phlash16' with the correct rom and reprogram the BIOS back to the version it had previously. Upon rebooting the machine, and re-attaching it's actual Sata drive everything booted back up as normal. The server loaded and is now sitting happily whiring away as it should. I'll be keeping this key-chain around for a while to come I think. I bought a Rev-G board ready to replace the damaged one should I not have been able to recover, but it does not have Sata on it, however as it's a good working system, and I have a spare case it will fit, and an old IDE based server that it can replace, just in case I have any more screw up's Thanks again Guys for all your Hard-work, there's tons of these systems floating around second hand, and there absolutely awesome for running small office and home networking setup's off. In my case I use them to build up development environments for projects I'm working on, and it's guys like you that help us to keep them up and running. Update 1 3 Days later the server is back up and running again, this time with the correct 1.6.2 Rev I bios loaded, however as of last night I got a random lock up, so I guess I'm back to square one. My one extra observation however appears to be Intense disk activity that seems to be the trigger. If anyone can think of any ideas why the sporadic locks I'd be appreciative of your suggestions. If you want to ping me outside the forum, you can find me on twitter as @shawty_ds