2009 Quad upgrade to 2010 Hex while booting from ARC-1882

[mluters]

I currently have a 2009 Quad 3.33 that I want to upgrade to a 2010 Hex 3.33. I also use an Areca ARC-1882 IX-12 raid card to boot from a stripped RAID 0 and also have a 8TB raid 5 attached to the ARC-1882.

Here is my question...is my EFI upgrade going to work while booting from the Raid card or do I need to flash to EFI 5.1 using a regular sata hard drive connected directly to the back plane of my MP? I know once the MP is on 5.1, the MP should boot just fine with the ARC-1882 because I have read about other people using Areca cards after upgrading. I just don't know if I can upgrade the EFI to 5.1 with the 3rd party raid card installed and booting from it? Or...do I just boot from an extra USB external hard drive and upgrade to EFI 5.1 from that?

Any help before I upgrade would be greatly appreciated because I really don't want to mess up my Raid setup.

Thanks in advance

 

[wa5655]

You need to upgrade your MP firmware from a drive connected to the backplane or it won't work properly. After that, you can boot from your Areca.

 

[mluters]

I followed your advice and booted from a spare hard drive connected to the backplane and then upgraded to EFI 5.1. It worked great and now I've booted from the ARC-1882 card without any problems....I'll be dropping a 6 core 3.33 in the next few days to complete the upgrade. Thanks

 

[mluters]

I finished my upgrade today by dropping in a intel W3690 hex 3.46ghz CPU. Everything seems to be working fine and now I've extended the life of my 2009 MP for at least a couple more years.