Dell Precision Tower 5820 - FlexBay MiniSAS PCIe NVMe SSD not recognized
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@matijn Thank you for providing feedback on this issue, since it has been driving us crazy not having the hardware on hand.
Just so I understand the picture here. FOG Images OK when connected to the sata ports as listed in the picture? Again for clarity the picture above shows a working solution?
I take it the ODD sata ports are the special new data ports? From within windows, can you tell what hardware ID is associated with those ODD ports? I feel that the linux kernel is missing a needed driver, but we can’t seem to identify it.
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@george1421
What I understand, out of dell 5820 owners manual:
https://topics-cdn.dell.com/pdf/precision-5820-workstation_owners-manual2_en-us.pdfODD is Optical Disk Drive. Maybe wrong assembly.
I can confirm, capture and deploy task, no issue. OK.
I will update this on the hardware id question… -
Because they’re marked as ODD, they might be on a different controller altogether and possibly with more limited functionality too.
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@matijn I actually did not have issues with the ODD ports (when used with 2.5 SSDs), they connect the two SATA ports on our 5820s. The two FlexBay ports are connected to PCIE0 and PCIE1, which are a mini-sas type connector (pic below). I can’t remember if I tried moving the flexbay NVMe to the standard hot swap bays, but I don’t believe I did.
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@hlalex This is all great info guys. Thank you.
Its hard without having the hardware in hand for the developers to find out what’s missing. Seeing is better than trying to imagine what things look like.
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@george1421 I got another system with the flex bay adapter via mini-sas port (Precision 7820). I was able to persuade the owner of said system to let me borrow the flex bay adapter for testing Fog. I now have a 5820 installed with the flex bay if you have any tests you would like to run
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@hlalex So how does this flex bay adapter interface with the mobo? Is it via the connectors mentioned below?
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@george1421 Ok, so the NVMe drive fits into a proprietary carrier, which then slides into a 3.5" SAS adapter (pics below). That slides into one of the two top hot swap bays on the 5820. The backplane on those bays connects to the MoBo via mini-SAS headers that Dell labels PCIe0 & PCIe1 (previous post).
EDIT: Forgot to mention, Windows recognizes the disk as @Matijn posted (PC400 NVMe SK hynix…). Not sure where to look for information on the actual hardware connection. Also, If i plug the 3.5" adapter into one of the bottom hotswap ports (SATA/SAS MoBo connection) it is not recognized at all.
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@hlalex Those pictures are very helpful. I still have the question on how does this carrier connect into the motherboard or is it via a sas riser card?
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@george1421 It connects directly to the MoBo beside the CPU slot, I posted a pic of the PCIE headers ~7 posts back.
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@hlalex ok thank you for the clarity. Between your pictures and a few Dell youtube videos I understand how everything plugs in.
I’ve been trying to think of a solution to get us where we need to be. I’m wondering if you have time, can you install fedora 28 on that workstation? Then upgrade the kernel to 4.18.x if its not already there? https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Kernel
If this works with fedora 28 and linux kernel 4.18.x then maybe we can reverse engineer what is missing. We’ll need you to run the same collection scripts you had before because that collected exactly what we needed. If it works the only additional output would be a lsmod command to find out what modules were currently loaded.
If you did not want to write to the nvme disks, installing fedora on a sata disk would also work as long as the nvme tray disk is installed and detected by the OS.
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This post is deleted! -
@matijn OK I’ve read your post 6 times and I don’t understand what you are saying. Sorry I feel I need more coffee this morning.
Are you saying that the latest FOG kernel at 4.18.11 works with this flexbay NVMe?
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Haha, so many questions here.
And so little answers. Its actually rather funny how long this whole conversation has been going for.
Good luck in figuring this out ! -
@george1421 Sorry for the delay, I had a drive fail in an array that has been taking up a lot of my time trying.
I missed @matijn’s last post and it has been deleted now… I will try to get those logs uploaded today.
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@george1421 Ok, I have tried both the live installer and net installer for F28. Both methods detect the drive during the installation process. After the reboot, I get dumped to a dracut shell complaining that /dev/mapper/xxx root and swap does not exist.
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@hlalex Oh so close. Are you installing to the flexbay nvme or a sata disk? Its promising that FC28 sees the disk. We just need to find out what module its loading. When you run some installers, when in installer mode you can press alt-f2 or crlt-f2 to open a new console window to see what is going on in the background. From your error it sounds like the proper driver isn’t loaded into the boot partition for FC28 to see the disk. (but that is only a guess)
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@george1421 I am attempting to install directly to the NVMe flexbay. To rule out any extraneous variables I am going back to the F27 4.13.9-300 Live install that was previously working with this drive arrangement. If it installs and boots, then I will try upgrading to F28 and pull logs. Then I will go back to trying to get logs for F28.
