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> I wonder if FreeDOS has anyl relevance Well, just yesterday I had to run FreeDOS from a USB in order to run a sas2flash utility that didn't run on Linux or d

by diggan 2y ago

> I wonder if FreeDOS has anyl relevance Well, just yesterday I had to run FreeDOS from a USB in order to run a sas2flash utility that didn't run on Linux or directly via UEFI, so I could flash some firmware to a SAS controller. Seems at least some of us still need it :) Btw, avoid getting a SAS controller if you can, and get a motherboard that directly supports as many SATA drives as you need. Few things have been as frustrating as dealing with this SAS controller thing.

vin047 2y ago
Off-topic, but what SAS controllers are you having trouble with? Was going to get some for my NAS, would be good to get some insight on what to get and expect!
- diggan 2y ago
  As mentioned in the other comment, the controller shipped with IR firmware, while I wanted IT firmware on it, so all drives shows up in the OS, instead of doing hardware RAID. I don't think this specific controller is more/less problematic than others, just that all the tooling around SAS seems to suck. At first I couldn't get sas2flash to work on Linux, so ended up trying to boot an UEFI shell with sas2flash.efi instead, which refused to work seemingly because of some motherboard/UEFI version/controller incompatibility. So ultimately I used FreeDOS to finally be able to run sas2flash, so I could flash the IT firmware. Maybe I'm spoiled, but overall it's been a somewhat confusing journey. And today I also started looking into getting LTO8 for long-term backups, probably will be even worse, judging by the docs I've gone through so far...
rekoil 2y ago
When I have to deal with a SAS controller my go to is always to see if it's possible to flash it with IT (initiator/target) firmware so that it just becomes basically pass through disks for the OS to handle however it pleases.
- diggan 2y ago
  Yes, this is exactly why I had to dive into that rabbit hole, since the controller arrived with IR firmware and I need it to run IT...

by diggan 2y ago

vin047 2y ago

Off-topic, but what SAS controllers are you having trouble with? Was going to get some for my NAS, would be good to get some insight on what to get and expect!

diggan 2y ago
As mentioned in the other comment, the controller shipped with IR firmware, while I wanted IT firmware on it, so all drives shows up in the OS, instead of doing hardware RAID. I don't think this specific controller is more/less problematic than others, just that all the tooling around SAS seems to suck. At first I couldn't get sas2flash to work on Linux, so ended up trying to boot an UEFI shell with sas2flash.efi instead, which refused to work seemingly because of some motherboard/UEFI version/controller incompatibility. So ultimately I used FreeDOS to finally be able to run sas2flash, so I could flash the IT firmware. Maybe I'm spoiled, but overall it's been a somewhat confusing journey. And today I also started looking into getting LTO8 for long-term backups, probably will be even worse, judging by the docs I've gone through so far...

rekoil 2y ago

When I have to deal with a SAS controller my go to is always to see if it's possible to flash it with IT (initiator/target) firmware so that it just becomes basically pass through disks for the OS to handle however it pleases.

diggan 2y ago
Yes, this is exactly why I had to dive into that rabbit hole, since the controller arrived with IR firmware and I need it to run IT...