Z820 bricked, and I'm not sure how.

[mungee]

Hi,

I bought this used Z820 which was working fine with Windows 10.  I wanted to add a raid 0 array to this machine but had no luck with the onboard LSI adapter.  I purchased a PCI LSI card that was flashed to IT mode.  I was in the process of flashing it to IR mode in DOS when I had a power outage.  When I tried to reboot the computer I couldn't.  I can only get as far as the bios screen which prompts you to enter esc to go to the start-up menu.  At this point you can press the esc, F9 or F10 for the various option and the computer recognizes the keystroke.  This is as far as I can proceed because the computer will just hang at a black screen with a cursor in the upper left hand corner.  I've tried the crisis recovery with no luck.  Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.  I don't look forward to trashing a machine I haven't even used.

Thanks. 

[DGroves · Accepted solution]

sigh, by trying the crisis recovery you have now most likely corrupted the z820 bios adding yet another issue the recovery procedure below will work if you have not trashed the bios by trying a recovery

i really wish people would STOP with the bios flashing/bios recovery  every time something appears to go wrong all it does in most cases is dig yourself a deeper hole

remove the raid card, now remove the power cord, then press the pwr button for 10 sec or until the pwr light/beeping stops

now remove side cover, and remove cmos battery,  (note correct orientation of battery!!)

wait 10 sec then press cmos reset button for 3 sec

replace cmos battery, side cover, pwr cord and start system enter bios set date time

if not booting from onboard LSI controller disable LSI boot rom and onboard network boot rom(s)

system should now start and load windows if a bootable drive is connected to one of the two sata 6GBps ports

the 4 ports next to the 6GBps ports are the Intel "SCU" ports that require the 4.3 or 4.6 RSTe (enterprise) driver

you can make a bootable raid using the onboard LSI bios (enable it if disabled)

your LSI card is corrupted, and must be recovered,.......... google how to recover (lsi card model here) from bad flash

[mungee]

Amazing!

I'm pretty sure I tried everything you listed, just not in the order you laid out with no success.  Doing it in the order you listed has done the trick. 

I'm glad that the crisis recovery didn't dig me in deeper and I will surely heed your warning.

I'll try again with the onboard LSI, but I had no luck the first time around.

Thanks so much.