I have a DL380 G3 server with a clean Server 2008 x86 installation. I need a SAS controller into it, so I put an LSI SAS 3442X-R SAS controller in there.
Upon booting the server, it seems to load a built in driver and everything seems OK. However, when you power off the server, it will hang the server forever. I have to hold the power button to force it off. At that point, if I turn the server back on, it will never boot the OS. It will hang at the Server 2008 splash screen (with those green lines running across the screen forever)
I have to remove the card, and then the server boots just fine. After booting back up (with the card removed), I have to remove the installed driver (enabling the viewing of hidden hardware, and then turn on view hidden devices). Once I uninstall the driver, I can once again repeat the procedure or putting in the card, and server will boot one time, but will hang on shutdown and hang on bootup.
Due to budget limitations, this is the only hardware I have available to work. I know the server is stable, and I know the card works (it works perfectly under a Windows 2003 server)
Now I know this LSI Logic card is very old (circa 2005), and I've not found any mention of any support for Server 2008, except for the fact that on LSI's own site, there are drivers for Server 2008 and even Server 2008 R2 x64.
So it would be odd that LSI provides drivers for an OS that it then does not support?
Of course, I did try to install the drivers that LSI's site provides. Oddly when I point the device to this driver, it says the driver installed already is fine. So what I did was once again remove the device, and then I replaced the server's built in driver with the LSI provided driver. So the next time I repeated this process, it now loads the more up to date LSI provided drivers, but the same issue still occurs. The server can only boot one time, and will hang on shutdown and will hang on startup.
Any help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Here is the link for the 2008 Drivers I found:
http://www.lsi.com/support/pages/download-results.aspx?component=Storage+Component&productfamily=Legacy+Host+Bus+Adapters&productcode=P00400&assettype=0&productname=LSI+SAS+3442X-R