I assume you’ve found this page by searching for «f/w is in fault state» or PERC H700 / H800 / 5i / 6i «failed to get cpcontroller object» after you’ve done a firmware upgrade. I’ve been looking for a solution to my problem, nobody seems to know the answer. I solved it and decided to make this post on my blog.
First of all, don’t be frightened by all these Cyrillic writings around my website, I am Russian and I post stuff in Russian. I’ve spent my whole Sunday trying to figure out the freaking thing, I tried everything from trying to run Megafl -adpm0flash -f FILENAME.rom from dos, win lite, i even tried a usb version of centos to run a RedHat fw update from Dell’s website. It all showed «no controller found» error, obsiously not letting me reflash it. I even tried Megafl -adpm0flash -f FILENAME.rom -aAll (to update all adapters in the system) – tough luck.
The real problem was, I could not reach the hard drives sine the controller was out, and my board (Dell PowerEdge R610) has only one sata port used by the cd-rom, and I did not have a hard drive with windows preinstalled to boot from.
Anyway, the answer to the problem is below.
Thankfully, I have several servers, so my last resort would be disconnecting a battery backup unit, taking the card out, and installing it into another server (PE 2950) that has windows on it, to try and re-run a flashrom update from there.
The funny thing is, once I took out the card, and put it into another server, it didn’t show any errors on the boot (well, except for lost raid config), so it lead me to believe that the underlying problem was the BBU keeping the card config and somehow conflicting with the new firmware config (whatever sense it makes). So, if your symptoms are alike, my guess is – try this: unplug the battery and sas/sata cables, then take out the RAID card. Start the sever without the card. Shut down the server once past the initialization stage. Put the card back and reattached the cables and the battery cable. Voila! Should be working fine.
Good luck!
