But with luck the previous information will help a lot to make sense of it, and to figure out what to try if it fails, and why it might fail (if it does). Maybe it's old-fogey conservatism but I generally avoid bleeding-edge kit as it normally takes a minimum of six months to iron out the kinks (and in the case of some technologies, fundamental design flaws may surfaced). I picked up two LSI 9211-8i 8 port SATA/SAS cards so I can add more than 8 drives to my FreeNAS box. Mount the LSI card in your machine, plug in the USB drive with all four files on it (the LSI BIOS, the firmware, the sas2flash utility and the efi shell), and drop into the BIOS of your machine.

I see a fair few reports about newer versions of the module not properly enabling ethernet mode though so you might be on to something there.These cards simply cannot be messed up so badly that megarec can't low-level erase them, as far as I can tell. Comprehensive list of known/common cards, OEM variants, and the chips used/capabilities - with thanks to ServeTheHome.

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.For Dell variants of the 9211-8i, the A10 9211-8e firmware is known to work well as an IT firmware to flash in this step, as explained and linked above. Note: In theory you could probably flash these two steps the other way round, meaning, crossflashing Dell/Fujitsu IR to LSI IR P7 first, and then LSI IR P7 to LSI IT, but I haven't tried that, nor have I found any post saying that someone else has tried it. A small number of motherboards are pains in the neck - sas2flash detects EFI capability so MSDOS version won't run, but it's also not easy to get EFI shell to run either.

If you're not needing SAS3 or NVMe speeds for SSDs though, the old SAS2x08 chipsets are still more than adequate for any platter-based drives and most SSDs and play nice with EFI (as far as I'm aware anyway) - as long as those things keep on trucking and suit your use case, there's no reason not to use them. To make sure your card is now in IT mode, reboot your machine and it should get displayed when the card's BIOS is run. From this point on we're done with megarec and we only need to reboot into MSDOS/EFI (whichever sas2flash requires).

I tried using sas2flash and it would open the application then immediately close it with no time to see the window itself. The only file systems MSDOS and EFI can both by default understand are FAT / FAT32 ( *not* exFAT, NTFS or ext3/4! The LSI 9211-i8 HBA controller has two ports - one to the Intel expander and the other port is currently free.

If I'm using an LSI RAID card on a SuperMicro server motherboard, I shouldn't need to do the UEFI thing right? The firmware and boot rom files, and sometimes the flashers, are often wrapped up in zip or exe files which need to be unpacked and the relevant files extracted. exe) will NOT work on a board that's detected as EFI, and sas2flash EFI will NOT work on a board lacking EFI. If you use something really modern, say like SAS3408 based controller, you'd probably hear mostly crickets from the community. There is also some confusion regarding the state of the Mellanox drivers in Linux; some newer Linux versions are said to have dropped support for these cards but I have not personally confirmed this.I'm going to use an older Dell that should be a BIOS and not UEFI, so we can avoid issues with trying to accomplish this on a newer motherboard. LSI controllers can be hidden internally within other hardware such as some enterprise or high-spec SSDs or built into the motherboard. The zip file attached to this resource is already set up to allow booting both EFI and MSDOS if your board allows it - just copy its contents to the USB stick root directory and choose which one to boot to.