Ok, I read that error has to do with my BIOS being UEFI and then I read about another way of doing it using sas2flash.efi:

I found no other version of the flasher that worked reliably, having tried LSI's P7 EFI, a DELL flasher, etc. That was the one that worked. So far I'm very happy with the performance of the card but I haven't done any hard reliability tests yet (e.g. extract a "live" drive and see how the others behave). As best as I understand it, the maximum bandwidth quoted for PCIE assumes full duplex activity. But in practice when used for disk control, the duplex capability of SAS doesn't lead to huge extra bandwidth use, for various reasons, and SATA 6Gbit doesn't do full duplex anyway. Hence the system won't be able to get full benefit of PCIE duplex capabilities and the realistic max speed could be significantly closer to half-duplex, or 50% of maximum PCIE bandwidth. Hence why the figure I've given as a safe minimum is 250MB/s not the expected/often quoted 500 MB/s. Please correct me if I'm wrong on this! Discussed in detail below ) I went therefore ~65% over my original budget but at least this setup allowed me to connect up to 8 additional disks. IT vs IR Firmware

Micro Center”-branded ADATA Solid State Drive (Drive Caching, some space to take “write hits” from 830 and M5P-X; over-provisioned an extra 12.8GB)

If it does show LSI IT firmware as expected, then there isn't much else to do and you shouldn't have any problems. All that's left is: My current configuration: motherboard DFI HR100-CRM, i5-2510E 2.5GHz, 16 Gb RAM, FreeNAS 9.10 on 8 Gb CF card, 8 x 4Tb Seagate ST4000DM000 HDD.15, RAIDZ2, case Silverstone DS-380, Power Supply 450W Silverstone ST45SF-G. Temporarily disconnect with care any other hardware or boot/data devices that might get scrambled by this, any drives you might accidentally destroy, or whatever. Especially, unplug anything with an "under the hood" hidden LSI controller that you don't want flashed by mistake, such as some SSDs:). Note that some motherboards come with onboard LSI chips; if yours has one then take great care and ask around what to do, before going further.Now we dive into the firmwares and flashers. This is where the fun starts, but it's essential if you want to understand why the instructions are so darn messy and why they often don't work for people first time. You won't have much choice which version of sas2flash you'll use. If your motherboard appears to support EFI, then the MSDOS version won't run (you can try but you'll get a "PAL cannot be initialised" error) and you'll have to use sas2flash EFI. If it doesn't support EFI then of course only the MSDOS version will run. That means on an EFI board you'll need to boot into MSDOS for some things and EFI for others. The EFI version of sas2flash was actually much nicer and easier than the MSDOS version in use, because EFI supports long filenames, command history, filename completion, and nicer command language help, ls, cd, cp, mv - similar to basic linux (ls = list dir contents, cd = change current dir, mv/cp = move/copy files) Then in any case, * Reboot MSDOS and erase card's NVRAM using megarec as described above. * Reboot. * If you disabled oroms above, then you can optionally re-enable them again now. Solved. Card will now be erased and flashable, and the system will boot as normal. Carry on with your crossflashing process as described below. You've basically given no one anything to work with, so the responses will tend to be random guesses rather than anything useful. Forum Rules: https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/forum-rules.45124/

Partly it’s because I have enough GPU’s to fill every one of these computers and still have spares, and I want them running a Folding Farm. However, since the entire Folding Farm’s CPU’s and GPU’s are going to be part of the same chilled water loop, there’s PLENTY of air cooling for hard drives…. That, and older CPU’s (anything older than C2D/A64X2) won’t be Folding, they’ll be dedicated to their server 🙂 sas2flash -listall - lists all LSI 2008 controllers found. This is the controller in the 9211. Ideally equivalent to listing all 9211 variant cards found, but if it finds additional controllers DO NOT IGNORE THIS! See above - occasionally extra LSI 2008 controllers may be hidden in SSDs and on the motherboard. After finding some PDFs with various bit of info on LSI’s range of host bus adapters (HBAs) I thought I would bring them here to help anyone looking at using one. LSI HBA cards are great way to add fast storage beyond the motherboard supplied SAS and SATA ports. A LSI HBA is a simple disk controller and is great for adding well supported, reliable and low cost SAS and SATA ports to a server. One additional benefit of the LSI HBA line is that you can pass disks directly through to the OS, without needing a RAID layer. This is important for advanced storage systems such as ZFS where you do not want hardware controllers to interfere. These LSI HBA’s often come in configurable Firmware options ie IT for JBOD only, or IR mode for simple RAID (RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 10.) Another key benefit is that the LSI HBA lineup tends to be very popular with OEMs such as IBM, HP, Dell, Oracle, Fujitsu, Intel, Supermicro and others, so driver support is generally strong regardless of the OS you are using. On these cards, you can't usually flash an IT firmware over an existing IR firmware. You have to erase the flash, then flash from IR to IT of the same brand. Only once you've got it running the *IT* firmware can you make the switch to LSI if it's a Dell or other manufacturer card. (When I say "Dell" I really mean "whatever your card brand is").

These cables usually need MOLEX (old style 4 pin) connectors but most power supplies provide SATA connectors, so you might need to buy some SATA to MOLEX adapters/splitters, too. In other words flash 1) DELL IR -> DELL IT, 2) DELL IT -> LSI IT P7, 3) LSI P7 -> LSI LATEST (P20+).