I recently bought an Adaptec 39320 SCSI card from ebay so I could connect a tape drive to my VMware ESXi server. What arrived was a Dell-branded 39320 (model ASC-39320/DELL), which I didn’t think would be a problem (famous last words…). I installed the card, and the Adaptec BIOS picked up the tape drive during boot as expected. However, ESXi refused to recognise the card or the tape drive, even after multiple reboots and re-scans of the storage devices. A quick google search gave me the answer straight away – I needed to disable HostRAID on the SCSI card in order to put the 39320 in “plain old SCSI mode”. No problems – or so I thought…
When I went into the SCSI BIOS, the option to disable HostRAID was missing! It turns out that Dell removed the option to disable HostRAID on this card with their OEM firmware – meaning it would never work with ESXi 
After a bit of googling I found a forum post (in German) that described how to re-flash the Dell card to turn it back into a regular Adaptec 39320 card. Some kind soul on the forum provided me with the files I needed, and it worked 
I went back and took some pictures so I can describe the process and also provide the files needed. You will need a floppy disc; you can either use this image file to automatically make a bootable floppy using WinImage, or if you already have a bootable floppy you can just download the files you need and put them on the floppy.
The first step is to boot your machine from the floppy disc, and the SCSI utility should start automatically:
The next step is to back up the SEEPROM (in case this process doesn’t work):
Now we need to reboot the computer so that the new SEEPROM takes effect. Boot from the floppy disc again, and it’s time to update the BIOS:
NB: I take no responsibility for the success or failure of this process. It worked for me (and many others), but your mileage may vary If you took a backup of the files as directed, you should be able to recover your card, but I make no promises as I’m not an Adaptec engineer!Exit the utility and you now have a “vanilla” Adaptec 39320 SCSI card Exit the SCSI utility, remove the floppy disc and reboot – your card should now appear as an Adaptec 39320! You can now disable HostRAID by pressing CTRL-A and then:
Awesome! Thanks so much for this. Worked perfectly on my Dell PowerEdge SC1420.
Hi Matt,
Firstly, I would like to say a big thank you for writing this excellent article. It has certainly helped me to get a testbed machine up and running. I’m sure that are many people out there that will benefit from these pearls of wisdom too.
One question I do have please is have you managed to setup the RAID controller to support RAID1 using the 2 built in SCSI disks? I have attempted this via the Adaptec BIOS, but ESXi refuses to load stating that it has found two installations with the same UUID.
If setting up RAID directly on the card isn’t a possibility, have you identified any other workarounds?
Hi Matt! Thank you for the great article!
I have the same problem with this card on a Dell Poweredge 2950 (Ubuntu 7.10). I want to connect this server with a Promise Ultratrak RM15000 disk array, which was previously connected to a Dell PowerEdge 2400 and hosted the users home directories. Although normally this process would be trivial, Ubuntu cannot see the disk array as a scsi device, although I made a lot of different combinations with the Adaptec card’s BIOS settings. Finally, I tried the method described in your article, but the result is the same… Although the disk array is recognized by the SCSI Utility, it can not be seen from Ubuntu. lshw and lspci commands show that Adaptec card is there…And lsmod shows that the corresponding drivers are there too. Do you have any idea or experience on that?
Thank you in advance.
So if I disable HostRaid, how can i then use the adapter to create raids?
Thanks Matt – your files and guide worked perfect.