HP DL120 Gen9 not detecting disks.

[gouldrl]

I have a DL 120 Gen9 that has a B140i dynamic smart array. The HPE disks are inserted into drive slots one and two. The disk activity light on the drive carriers are solid amber and the Smart Storage Administrator says "there are no configurable physical drives attached to the current array controller".

I'd prefer to not use the DSA because Ubuntu is certified to run on it without the DSA enabled. I'm going to allow mdadm to manage the software mirror volumes.

In the Ubuntu server installation, the installer doesn't see any disks.

The first hurdle is, why are the disk activity lights solid amber? The second would be, how do I get Ubuntu Server installer to see the disks so I can partition and configure them as mdadm managed disks?

[Jimmy Vance]

You need to change the controller mode in RBSU from B140i RAID to SATA AHCI. Even in B140i mode, the OS should see the drives as it is the hpdsa driver that makes the RAID functional.

Are the drives SATA or SAS? This controller only supports SATA drives., but even if they are SAS, the amber lights shouldn't be on.  

[gouldrl]

The disks are SAS. I could swear when I read through the laundry list of supportd disks that SAS disks were compatible.

I did find where to change the controller to AHCI. Prior to your reply, I reset the BIOS to factory defaults as well.

After restting BIOS to defaults and changing the setting you mentioned, the disk activity lights on the carriers still show in amber.

[Jimmy Vance]

SAS disks are supported if you use one of the optional 'P' or 'H' series controllers that support SAS, see page 29 of the quickspec

https://h20195.www2.hpe.com/v2/GetPDF.aspx/c04834960.pdf

The embedded chipset controller only supoorts SATA