After yesterday’s fiasco I needed a break, not a break from IT, but something challenging, I know, how weird yeah.
When most people get burned, they run from fire, I charge after it.
So this is what happened, and this pain was brought me joy today.
Today I went out with one of my daughter’s in search of a SATA controller card.
As an aside, I was also looking for a video card, found one in a GeForce GTS 960 for $60. Not sure if it works, that will be later tonight or tomorrow even, but wanted to note it in future searches.
Went to multiple Recycle PC places, but the final stop was where I found this old, more than a decade, RAID card. I negotated them down from $30 to $10, but make no mistake this card is OLD, it is a 9650SE SATA-II RAID PCIe card.
The chip says AMCC but it is a 3Ware 9650SE
Why did I buy this card?
- It’s cheap, $10.00
- It’s old so support with Linux should be high
- I couldn’t find a Perc H310
- Has those SFF-8087 connectors that work in this case
- PCI-E
- It’s cheap, $10.00
Oh did I mention I got it for a cheap.
Here’s a huge problem, this thing had no bios, so I could not press ALT+F3 (or is it 3) to configure it.
I had to scour the Internet for Utility to manage this via command line, came across twi_cli, but I had to download it from a 3rd party because 3ware no longer exists
If you are interested, look search on the Internet for 3DM2_CLI-linux_10.2.2.1_9.5.5.1.zip
Here are the checksums I have for the files I found
md5sum 3889909bc63c7f65be89006d22a55b28 3DM2_CLI-linux_10.2.2.1_9.5.5.1.zip
sha256 5354dd539d01163ee6d371da1bd595157dc6db8bfe0907dbb2b920d88cd627a9 3DM2_CLI-linux_10.2.2.1_9.5.5.1.zip
After you download it, you can simply unzip and untar the nested file and look for tw_cli.x86_64, that is the executable you need. If you want to install here are the steps
- unzip 3DM2_CLI-linux_10.2.2.1_9.5.5.1.zip
- sh install.sh -i
- Answer yes
- You don’t to install the web interface
If you do install the web interface, use https and go to port 888 password is “3ware”
I don’t like it, I just use the cli
Here is where it get’s interesting
Use the tw_cli command line utiltiy
tw_cli info
To figure out what the controller card is, in these examples we will use c9
First turn check if jbod is on, it is normally
tw_cli /c9 show exportjbod
If you need to set it
tw_cli /c9 set exportjbod=on
Now you can add a disk a single JBOD disk, DO NOT ENABLE CACHE
tw_cli /c9 add type=single disk=0 nocache
Do it for all the disks
But here is the first problem, if you are importing from another disk. You will need to shrink it because parted will complain.
Here is a link on how to shrink it but you will lose the end of the disk because it seems to be where the signature the controller writes to.
https://gparted.org/h2-fix-msdos-pt.php#partition-outside-disk
I would highly recommend making the disks a bit smaller than the physical disks.
I shut down the system and was able to mount the disks without the controller.
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