Issues with 2208flashed to 2308 IT mode in combination with supermicro backplanes

Hi.

Could to with some support on this one as I’m starting to get lost. I have a Supermicro case with 24 bay backplane up front, and a 12 bay at the rear.

The SAS2208 controller (external card) wasn’t the easiest to flash, but after good help in this post it seem like I managed to get it to work, at least 90%. (Flashing SAS2208 to IT mode when sas2flsh does not detect it)

The issue now is that I can only connect 1 of the 2 backplanes to the controller card, if I connect them both either by using 1 cable to each backplane, or with 1 cable to the first backplane, and a backplane extender cable from the front to the rear backplane, the 2308 will halt/stop at the point where its bios say: Initilizing…\ to the screen during boot.

It works fine with only 1 backplane connected at the time (no matter what connector on the card is used), and it also seem to work connecting 1 backplane, in addition to hooking up a disk to a 1 → 4 sata style cable that I took from a different raid-card. I even manage to boot Windows via the controller, so somehow I think it might be working more or less as it should.

So my initialization issue only happens when both backplanes are connected in whatever way I try.

Have anyone seen this behaviour before and got any clue where I can start to look?

I did flash the Supermicro 2308 bios files by using the .bat file in the package from Supermicro, and I noted that it seemed to first flash the firmware, then the bios: MPTSAS2.ROM and straight after that bios flash, a new bios flash with a file something like x64… and some more that I can’t remember just now. Should I try to just re-flash the MPTSAS2.ROM file with the -b parameter (SAS2FLSH), or is it ok for it to be flashed twice like it was done?