IBM ServeRAID Issues
October 28th, 2005
If you have an IBM ServeRAID card running a pre 7.00 firmware, you will have trouble upgrading directly to the current firmware (7.12 as of this posting). Apparently there were changes allowing for larger firmware to be loaded. Regardless of that, you will see Error codes = 0x1446 and EC: 04h-46h when attempting to flash from the Support CD or the firmware bootdisks. You need to find a copy of 7.00 on IBM's site, first upgrade to 7.00 and then 7.12. All of this is not very well documented. At least after doing that you will have a working/configurable RAID controller. The support CD does not seem to allow you to configure the controller without upgrading the firmware.
In addition to my little firmware issue, the old gateway 7210 that I'm putting this card in supposedly has a 64bit pci slot. What it has is an abomination. My current server runs a supermicro board, which itself has an actual 64bit pci slot. The difference is the distance between the 32bit pci portion and the extended portion. Normally the spacing is the same as that of the 32bit pci connector's segments. Apparently gateway made up their own, because this slot has about 3x the space between those two bits. What this leaves me with is a nice 64bit pci card in a 32 bit slot. Yay. I'm tempted to try and fit my supermicro board into this case. All i really want is the hot swap scsi backplane.
March 2nd, 2007 at 01:00 PM Thanks man, I was scratching my head for hours and then finally found your notes on having to flash the ServeRAID to 7.0 before going to 7.12.. this issue really needs to be better highlighted on IBM's website!
April 24th, 2007 at 05:08 PM Thanks very much for your post. I googled 0x1446 and yours was the ONLY explaination on the entire Internet. You saved me a lot of time and aggrevation.
June 7th, 2007 at 09:24 AM Very helpful info. Too bad I used my last CD to burn the 7.12 image... :P I will try 7.00 ASAP. Oh, and about the spacing issue of the slot, I have the same problem. I am using a jurassic IWill DBS100 and the card won't fit the 64-bit slot. I guess it's a funny idea by IBM to "standardize" their slots... Thank you very much.
June 7th, 2007 at 04:52 PM Many thanks from me as well. I have been fighting with this card for months and did realize what the problem was. A very good straight forward explanation.
July 12th, 2007 at 03:58 AM Thanks allot I to was scratching my head trying to update my 64bit IBM raid card was going to remove from server and forget about it but googled around and followed link to here thanks again .
August 22nd, 2007 at 11:50 PM Thanks for the info. IBM seems to have taken the 7.00 iso down from their website, and the floppy images don't work. However, 6.11 works too, and that is still up.
August 23rd, 2007 at 01:13 PM If anyone needs to get the 7.00 iso, just email or leave a post and I'll setup a torrent.
December 22nd, 2007 at 03:17 PM Actually, I used the IBM UpdateXpress CD v. 3.06 I downloaded after having this fail using the ServeRAID 7.12 disk. http://www-304.ibm.com/jct01004c/systems/support/supportsite.wss/docdisplay?lndocid=MIGR-5072951&brandind=5000008 It took care of the RAID array and some other updates as well. Worked like a charm.
February 25th, 2008 at 02:10 PM I love this kind of obscure info on the net. The above link now goes to IBM UpdateXpress CD v4.05. The 6.11 file can be found at http://www-304.ibm.com/jct01004c/systems/support/supportsite.wss/docdisplay?lndocid=MIGR-5071520&brandind=5000008
March 18th, 2008 at 09:04 AM Hello all, I need the ServeRAID 7.0 Boot CD, because it's a precondition for the installation of version 7.12 Anyone would be so gently to help me? hesed2724@tiscali.it Thanks in advance :-)
March 18th, 2008 at 09:47 AM Hello all, If you have not found version 7.0 ..also ServeRAID version 6.11 made the system able to upgrade to 7.12 ..with ServeRAID 7.12 Boot CD! Thanks 2 all :-)
July 2nd, 2008 at 09:04 AM Thanks for the article, saved me a lot of hassle. Thanks also to the commenters for the direct link & info about 6.11. :-)