The card in the current IR-mode can take up an insane amount of time to start (in my case ~4 minutes in IR-mode, later in IT-mode it takes ~20 seconds), so don't even start thinking that your PC/server is hanging if you keep staring at the "Avago" boot prompt of the card for less than 5 minutes (I thought so and put it into a second PC getting the same result).

LSI SAS 9211-8i PCI Express to 6Gb/s SAS Host Bus Adapter

If you then do a 2nd attempt you should be able to get to the UEFI-shell. Flashing the firmware 3: flash! Next you should see starting shell execution, ending with a prompt: "Shell>" (not the "2.0 Shell>"!). However, the link to a file required for this procedure "Shell_Full.efi" no longer exists and when googling for it, I can only find the faulty version that throws the “InitShellApp: Application not started from Shell” error. Can anyone please send me the correct file?If you do see your card then erase its current firmware with " sas2flash.efi -o -e 6" and then write the new one with " sas2flash.efi -o -f 2118it_hey.bin -b mptsas2_hey.rom" (I have added the " _hey" just to avoid that you flash junk into your card as you might use these instructions e.g. for other card models) Once the installation is complete, cd to EFI directory of the USB drive. Then create a folder called ‘tools’ # mkdir tools I followed the procedure above to create a bootable flash drive and while it would show up in the server's boot menu, it would NOT boot for some reason. I noticed that these servers have a built in EFI shell, so I booted to that and was able to follow the procedure from step 13 on using the files I had copied over to the flash drive ( map -b to show a list of attached drives, fs1: (or whatever number) to use the drive, and so on).

Flash upgrading firmware on LSI SAS HBAs; Upgraded firmware Flash upgrading firmware on LSI SAS HBAs; Upgraded firmware

You can reboot then, when Controller initializes press control-C to define boot device, and then go into the system bios for set boot device. Copy Shell_Full.efi to the tools directory and rename it to ‘shell.efi’. Copy these three files – sas2flash.efi, 2118it.bin and mptsas2.rom to the root directory, so the structure looks like this:

Typical Apple Innovation…

The problem was how to flash the card for your motherboards. Unlike what Linus Tech Tips suggests, it doesn’t matter which motherboard you have. What matters is that you need access to an EFI shell where you can easily run some command to change the mode and flash the card. Instead of Megarec.exe, i just ran the sas2flsh.exe -c 0 -o -e 7 command to erase it first, and hoped for the best.