to hook up a md1200 DAS to a r510 a PERC h800 adapter card is required. initially, we were shipped a h810 adapter card which happened to be a low-profile pcie card and thus would not fit correctly in the r510 (which requires standard sized cards)

the md1200 is connected via mini-SAS cables and the virtual drive can probably be configured from the PERC configuration utility (ctrl-R) during the boot process. i chose the easier route of using openmanage (OMSA) to configure the virtual drive. just open up OMSA and go to storage->the correct PERC (H800 in this case)->virtual disks, then begin the create virtual disk wizard. i preferred the advanced wizard over the express one.

initially, the disks were not visible from the wizard and i wanted to install the latest PERC driver to eliminate that as being the issue. that’s when things went downhill. right after the driver install i could no longer boot into windows, only the windows recovery console. the r510 also had a PERC h700 that controlled the RAID container that housed the windows OS. the h700 and h800 use the same set of drivers…so when i installed the latest driver it applied to both PERCs. i messed around with trying to fix the issue for about an hour before contacting dell support. finally got to a last known good configuration thanks to dell support. basically, you need to continuously press F8 right when the RAID initialization shows up in the boot process. keep pressing F8 through the DRAC setup dialog and you’ll eventually get to the windows boot options. before contacting support i tried this repeatedly because i hoped to get into windows safe mode and remove the offending driver, but i had no luck.

the functional driver version for the perc 700: 5.2.220.64

anyways, that’s a bit off track there but important to notate nonetheless…

the _actual_ problem of why the disks weren’t visible is because i hadn’t firmly connected the mini-SAS cables. the mini-SAS connectors can appear to be firmly connected but a slight jostling will make the cable fall out of the slot. the proper way to connect the mini-SAS cables is to insert the connector all the way then give it one last push until you hear a clicking sound. then the cable is correctly connected. so my fault…but at least it was a simple solution.