IBM ServeRAID Issues

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.