My home NAS, powered by a (used) 3ware 9550SXU-8LP, started behaving weird during the weekend. The box would boot one time, but if you’d reboot it again it wouldn’t come back up. Now, since I don’t have a monitor attached to it (I didn’t take the monitor with me when I moved), I needed to borrow one from work – I’m gonna buy a DVI-D to HDMI-adapter soon, since the 42" LCD-TV is right besides the NAS.

After looking at it yesterday, the 3ware boots up the first time, but when I rebooted the system it would look like this:

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Waiting for 3ware Controller to Initialize... There is no response from the firmware
Please hit a key to continue.  The firmware is incompatible with BIOS.

After hitting the any key, the system would continue to boot just fine, but without the 2,6TB RAID5 array hosted on the 3ware.

I opened the box up, looked into the case but couldn’t find anything obvious … The controller card was sitting just fine in the PCI-X slot. After powering down the box, I removed the card out of suspicion, blew into the slot, and reseated the card again into that same slot .. guess what ?

It works … been running the system ever since that, without any troubles ❗