Usually when I come across a system like this, Ijust flash the firmware to an IT mode so we get just an AHCI system with JBOD, but sometimes it is not practical for remote systems or if we fear that flashing is too risky if something goes wrong. In this case, we unfortunately have to use LSI/Broadcom proprietary CLI tools (megacli) to even make the drives visible. Step 1 - Download MegaCLI The official broadcom packages lack .deb packages and only have .rpm for........

It's as simple as below where you just specify the dev device of the CDROM which is usually /dev/sr0. You can boot actual bootable discs like Windows, Linux, etc straight from a physical drive this way. sudo qemu-system-x86_64 -cdrom /dev/sr0 -m 4096 ........

I like dd, although it only reads it, usually a read test of the entire disk will uncover if your hard drive is bad in some parts. This is a good thing to do at least once a month, a lot of times bizarre program behavior, laginess and crashing/unnmounting problems etc.. are due to a failing disc and SMART won't know it or indicate a problem: We must also remember there's never a guarantee, I've found that ever since we moved to larger and more platters per drive with 1TB drives........