Begging for your Help - HP Micro G8 / B120i / LSI MegaRAID / HexOS - HELL

[Sam of Ham]

Hi all,

I'm truly sorry to be bringing you all a barely-HexOS related problem, but I come begging for help from the people who likely know best--NAS owners, Self-Host Enthusiasts, and the HexOS team themselves--with my proverbial heart in my hands. I'm at the point where I am truly frustrated and I just need to ask in case anyone has the magic solution for me (and I will owe you big time if you do!)

Mods, I more than understand if this isn't relevant and you're welcome to remove this, and I apologise for wasting anyone's time. 

Here's the story. I'm upgrading from a HP Microserver (circa 2010) with no special upgrades; mainboard, SATA bays, TrueNAS CORE. Over time, the TrueNAS system locks up, and, while it works, I can't access or log into it at all - the login page just gives me "incorrect username/password" and I have to force power-cycle the thing. That's fine; I've wanted to upgrade for a while and found a good deal on a fully-kitted HPE Microserver G8 (with iLO - perfect!) from an enthusiast. HBA card, integrated RAID controller, 4-bay SATA, iLO, Xeon CPU, all the mods to make Disk 5 work for bootable media.

I have had nothing but problems in migrating. Wanting to get off of old CORE (iX are discontinuing it, plus, doing moronic things like removing native SMART data...) to HexOS and SCALE, and since I have an EA backer license wasting away, I figured, no worries, I'll install HexOS and migrate the disks. I plugged in an SSD, installed HexOS, claimed the server, happy as. I backed up all the data a second time just in case and moved the disks across (4x4TB WD Reds, FWIW.) No disks in HexOS/SCALE interface. Alright... Probably RAID - it used to be software RAID handled by CORE, this thing has the B120i. That's fine. Go into HP SSA - no disks, only bay 5. WTF?

Skip a lot of time and headaching and I realise the backplane is connected to the PCIe RAID controller (LSI 9261-8i) not the board (should have realised that, I know. I'm new to HBA RAID beyond just SW raid on Windows and CORE.) I... can't work out how to use the RAID card, it doesn't use a GUI, so it's all magic unknown CLI nonsense (to me, at least). Also, with some painstaking searching - it looks like LSI RAID cards need to be put into HBA mode for SCALE to control the RAID, but, SCALE doesn't support the card in HBA mode. Okay - fine. F*ck the RAID card - I disable it in BIOS and go back to the B120i. At this point I'm content with the RAID controller potentially losing me my data during RAID config. I screw around with boot modes about 18 times and finally get the drives to show up in HP SSA. Hoo-freaking-ray. Set up RAID, off we go to boot HexOS and install and get my goddamn NAS back up and running. 

And now we're up to NOW. With the drives in, I get the below: 

And with the drives OUT, I get this!

So I can't use the RAID controller, I maybe can't use the B120i, and it almost feels like I can't use HexOS either. Argh! I am lost! I feel like I'm destined not to have a nas with any form of modern features! No iLO, no RAID controller, no damn apps, just my buggy old CORE interface on a nearing-20 year old box. 

So, for at least just the sake of your understanding of my current mindset, I plead for any help anyone might have for me. I wrote this a little tongue-in-cheek-humoured, but honestly, I'm so damn angry at this whole process (not HexOS, as I said, but the whole thing; HP, SSA, the B120i, the LSI card, the iLO, the NAS, CORE, SCALE, HexOS, you name it, I'm just soured on the whole lot, meanwhile my NAS is down and my hopes of a simple home freaking media server are shrivelling up.) 

Thank you for your time and for any help you could possibly offer me. 

[Sam of Ham]

OH, by the way - yes, I did re-create the HexOS bootable drive, in case something on read screwed up GRUB or the HexOS Image. I used Rufus 4.6 and the lates HexOS .iso.