Alef

Wow, I was so close I tried removing "+" from the expression thinking it might affect it, but never did try removing brackets. Thank you for your help

Using LVM Check, dm-crypt Check, Samsung SSD check, Kernel 5.1 nope, running 4.9. Thanks for the heads up, could of been affected by this if I decided to update to a more recent kernel. 

I would avoid that cpu, while it may be powerful it's designed for multi socket systems, often quad cpu's. Which won't helpful with minecraft unless your running many servers. Also good luck sourcing a motherboard for that.

I would avoid that cpu, while it may be powerful it's designed for multi socket systems, often quad cpu's. Which won't helpful with minecraft unless your running many servers. Also good luck sourcing a motherboard for that.

I would avoid that cpu, while it may be powerful it's designed for multi socket systems, often quad cpu's. Which won't helpful with minecraft unless your running many servers. Also good luck sourcing a motherboard for that.

Intel is so obsessed with lakes and bridges that go over them.    I'll read the article in a sec.

Flashing an LSI 9211-8i to IT Mode
(might also be useful for flashing other LSI RAID cards)
 
(newbie edition)

"It can't  be that  difficult.", I thought to myself  before starting  this adventure.  "Tons  of people  have  done  it, there  are  quite  a few  tutorials  on it,  this should  be feasible."

Yeah, right...

Seriously though,  it's not actually that  tricky, it's just that the info  I needed to get it done  required quite a bit searching and trial-and-error.
Note:  I put  this in  the storage  subforum  instead of the tutorials because  it's fairly  specific and the  people who might find this useful are  more likely to be lurking around here I'd estimate.
 
 
Disclaimer
 
Flashing your cards can break  them if things go wrong. This post is merely  a documentation on my way to  success, and I provide  this  info in  the  hopes  it  might be  useful  to somebody. However,  I  take  no  responsibility  for  anyone else's misfortunes.
 
Proceed at your own peril.
 
Anyway...
 
FreeNAS Users
@wpirobotbuilder has discovered that FreeNAS already seems to have the  sas2flash utility built in,  check this post for more info.
Windows Users
See this post from  @Danny91 for a small tip about drive spin up and down.

The Objective
I plan  on using this  card in a  server running ZFS  as its main data  file system.  Since  this isn't a ZFS  tutorial I won't go into the details,  but basically ZFS prefers direct access to your disks without  a controller doing any "smart" things in between (like, for example, running a RAID setup).
Often, RAID  cards  will  be  delivered  running in  IR mode (Integrated RAID firmware), and we would like to change that to IT mode  (Initiator  target mode), so that the controller just  acts  as a  host  bus  adapter  without  trying  to do anything smart.
This can  also be desirable  if you're not running  ZFS, for example if you'd like to use software RAID.
In order to  change from IR to  IT mode, we need  to flash a different firmware onto the card.
 
 
What I Used

- motherboard: Asus P8Z68 (yes, the M/B matters)
- a 4 GB USB flash drive
- the file 9211-8i_Package_P17_IR_IT_Firmware_BIOS_for_MSDOS_Windows  from LSI's product  site's  "SOFTWARE DOWNLOADS" section on the 9211-8i.
- the file Installer_P17_for_UEFI from LSI's product site's "SOFTWARE DOWNLOADS" section on the 9211-8i
- a precompiled UEFI shell (see below for details)
Sources

I   primarily    followed   the   instructions   from  Bryan Vyhmeister's excellent blog post on this topic, but I needed to do quite a bit of additional research on getting the UEFI shell to  work, which is why I'm creating this tutorial (not that I fault  him for  that, his tutorial is not supposed to be an  UEFI shell primer, after all.  If it hadn't been  for his  post  it  would have  probably taken me many more hours than it did). There's quite a bit more info  I plowed through on my way to the  objective,  but none  of  it  was really  pertinent  to getting the job done.  Also,  for some of  the UEFI  shell files,  I used  the Arch Linux Wiki.

Shall We Proceed?
Alright then, let's get started.
 
Getting the Firmware and BIOS Files for the HBA
 
Note:  Obviously, the  version  numbers  might change in the future.
- Create a FAT partition on the USB drive.
- 9211-8i_Package_P17_IR_IT_Firmware_BIOS_for_MSDOS_Windows: Grab the  file  from  LSI's site (doesn't matter if you're running Linux, *BSD or Win)  and  unpack  it. You need the file 2118it.bin, located in the directory Firmware/HBA_9211_8i_IT in the archive.  Of  course  you can also choose to simply update the IR  firmware if you wish, then you'll need that file, located in Firmware/HBA_9211_8i_IR. Either way, copy
the firmware file onto your USB drive.
- You also need to update the card's BIOS for this (at least AFAIK), so also grab the file mptsas2.rom,  located in the directory sasbios_rel inside  the archive. Copy that  file onto your USB drive as well.
- Note:   You  can,  but  don't  need  to,  create  separate directories on your USB drive. In  the end,  we will  only have four files on it, so it doesn't really matter.
- Grab the Installer_P17_for_UEFI  file  from  LSI's website and unpack it.
- Copy the file sas2flash.efi, from in the directory sas2flash_efi_ebc_rel in  the  archive,  onto  your  USB drive,  into  the  same directory  as  the  firmware  and  the BIOS file (yes, I'm aware  you  can  put  all  of the three files at arbitrary locations, but why make things more complicated...).
- That's phase  1 completed, now  all that's left is getting this  to run  on  your  PC. That was actually the trickier part for me...

Getting the UEFI Shell
The first thing that went through my mind when I got to that part of  the tutorial  I linked above  was pretty  much just "WTF?".
I quite frankly had simply never heard of an UEFI shell, let alone  used one,  and  searching the  web  I found  precious little information  about the subject  (and what I  did find was mostly rather technical and  would have required lots of thorough  reading to  understand it,  and even  then it  was doubtful if it was actually going to be of any use to me).
For those  of you who are  also a bit puzzled  by this (then again, maybe I am the only  one), basically the EFI shell is a  command line  interface that  let's you  do basic  system tasks  on your  machine  (yes, I  am aware  that  that is  a very broad   generalization,  but  it  will  suffice for the purposes  of this  tutorial,  otherwise you  are welcome  to start reading docs on the subject).
Unfortunately, depending on your M/B (and that's why the M/B is relevant  in this), you  will require a  different shell, and will need to follow different steps to access it. I have gotten the  impression that  some boards  even come  with an integrated one,  but I'm  not 100%  certain on  that. If you have such  a board, you  can skip  the next part,  since you don't need to download one.

The different  versions of the  shell you're most  likely to need are these:

- For the most current version (the 2.0 branch), go here and select the one which matches your architecture.
- If those do not work for you (and in my case they did not), it might be that your M/B requires an older version, either the X64 or IA32 version.
- The  links  for  the v1 versions  I got from the Arch Linux wiki page here, as mentioned above.
- Copy the EFI shell onto your USB drive as well, I called it  shellx64.efi. I am not  absolutely  certain,  but  the name
  might matter to some extent  to  your M/B, I have also come across simpler names like shell.efi, but I was so glad when I finally got things working I didn't experiment further to
  check which names work and which do not.
 UPDATE: Did another flash, indeed Shell.efi also worked.
 
Flashing the HBA

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.

Note: I'm  not an  expert on  this subject,  but I have seen it  recommended to  have  only one  9211-8i  in your  system during this process. Allegedly it's possible to specifically target a  card to flash, but  I couldn't try that  out, so I have no info on that process.

Getting Into the UEFI Shell
This too wil probably depend on your M/B. On mine, there was an option  in the Exit  BIOS menu of  the BIOS which  said  Launch   EFI  Shell  from   filesystem   device.  Basically,  that option  will  search any  devices you  have connected for anything  that might be an EFI  shell and will try to run it.
If you have  the wrong shell or your machine  can't find it, you will fail here  (took me a few tries to  get to the next step...).

Mounting the USB Drive
Once  you're  in  the  shell,  you need  to  mount  the  USB drive  with the  files on  it so  that you  can access  them (obviously).
On   my   machine,   the   first   thing   the   shell   did was   print   a  nice   list   of   all  connected   storage devices,   with  my   USB   drive   labeled   ft0   and   my HDDs and  SSDs labeled  blk... You might need to do a bit of trial  and  error here  to  find  the  right drive,  but  it shouldn't be an insurmountable obstacle.
In my case, mounting the USB drive was done with:


Then I needed to change directories into the drive:
mount ft0: (yes, no 'cd ' or anything like that).
ft0: Inside a directory, you can list the contents with
and change directories with
ls And this is what it looked like for me after that:
cd directory_name (click image for full res)

 
Actually Flashing the Card
This was  actually fairly straightforward. Make  sure you're in the directory with  the BIOS, firmware and sas2flash.efi, and run the following command  to reset the card and prepare it for the new BIOS and firmware.
 
CAREFUL: DO NOT TURN OFF OR REBOOT YOUR MACHINE AT THIS POINT. ALLEGEDLY YOU WILL HAVE A BRICKED CARD ON YOUR HANDS!!!
 
This is what  it looked like during the  erasing process for me. The actual  erasing takes a  while, to be  specific this step:
(click image for full res)

sas2flash.efi -o -e 6 After a successful erase, this is what you should get: (click image for full res)  
 
Then flash it with the new files:   Which should look like this: (click image for full res)
 
You can check if the new flash was successful with:
sas2flash.efi -o -f 2118it.bin -b mptsas2.rom Which gave me this output: (click image for full res)

sas2flash.efi -listall Alternatively, you can get more detailed info with the -list command.  The  'Firmware Product ID" field  will indicate if the controller is now running in IT mode:
Output for that command:
sas2flash.efi -list (click image for full res)

 
NOTE: You  can  also check  if the sas2flash utility detects your card(s) properly with the listall command  before you start the  whole process. If the card  doesn't show  up  here,  you won't  be  able to  start flashing in the first place.

You can then  leave the UEFI shell with  exit and  should be back in your M/B's BIOS.
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.

As you  can see, it  is not  actually all that  complex, but there are  a hilarious many  things that can refuse  to play ball in this, and sorting out  those from the ones that work took quite  a bit  of effort. If you  search around  the web for  flashing  this  card  you will  find  many  alternative procedures,  and  depending  on your  setup  (hardware,  the version of  sas2flash you're using, which  firmware type and version you're wanting to flash  onto the card etc.) some of them might actually work for you.  For me, however, this was the only one that lead  to success. Thanks to Bryan's post I was able to save lots of time in finding out which files and tools I needed,  but then I was stuck quite  a while on that whole UEFI  shell thing. Once I  had that up and  running it was a pretty painless process though.
If you find  any errors please point them  out. I wrote down what I did quite carefully  during the process (primarily to make sure I  could reproduce it with a second  card should I ever buy  one), but  I'm not infallible,  so there  might be undesired entropy lurking somewhere.

Thanks for reading!

So long
-aw
 

I love accidents! They're so good sometimes.
 
 
Except children, those aren't good accidents.

I totally upgrade my optical drive all the time

Terrorism is bullshit, It'is always in the news, Our government makes massive policy & privacy changes, its all fearmongering...
Back in the real world over the last 10 years more people in the uk have died from
Bee stings or Toaster related accidents, than terrorist attacks...
We should kill all the bee's and ban toasters as they are more dangerous...

Make it a turbine design, It is simple and reliable, One huge fan in the front, PSU in the back corner, A smaller fan in the rear. Motherboard laying down in the middle.
Instead of having the back-io showing on the side, Have it in the case and have the cables through a hole.

lol that pcb

Just imagine somebody with large hands trying to game with this 

I have about a billion stories with non-techies from when I used to work in a computer shop. Here's one of them!
 
I was working in a small computer parts shop, mostly dealing with building PCs and stocking shelves and whatnot, rarely with customers directly, unless absolutely needed.
One day in 2010 (I think), just after Christmas a guy walks into the store with a PC. Since it was after X-mas, business was dead slow and we would only have a couple of customers per day, so we were (obviously) slacking and fooling around.
The guy set the computer on the counter and started yelling at my boss that the parts we sold him were broken and the computer didn't work. We had, indeed, sold him parts. Not a pre-built computer, mind you! I actually remembered the guy, since he was pretty much the only customer that had bought an AMD CPU and an Intel motherboard at the same time. Normally you'd think he was upgrading two different machines, not TRYING TO BUILD ONE.
What had happened:
He bought a mess of components, most of which weren't even compatible with each other. DDR2 for a DDR3-only motherboard, the previously mentioned AMD CPU for an Intel motherboard and so on.
Upon opening the case, my boss instantly released the loudest facepalm I had ever seen or heard in my entire life. His palm was now part of his skull!
I took a look inside. The CPU was forced into the Intel socket, the heatsink was mounted in holes the guy had DRILLED INTO THE MOTHERBOARD and secured with 5mm bolts. The memory slot had been chopped to bits to make the DDR2 fit and the PCI-E graphics card was shoved into a PCI slot.
 
Needless to say that all warranties were void and that my boss almost kicked the guy out of the shop. We actually had to close early that day since we started laughing way too hard and I almost passed out. I had never laughed and cringed so much in my life up to that point.
 
 
This is when I realized that I never want to deal with non-techies again in my entire life. 

.

Bing had a map?

I would check your underwear to make sure there are no marks.

I bought the Humble Bundle E3 ticket bundle, but I am not interested in all of the games, so some of you are lucky, i will leave the keys down below.
 
Magicka Wizard Wars Exclusive Staff and Blade        PV348-DF0K5-EQNJA
for this one you need Magicka game because its an add-on
Age of Empires II HD Edition: The Forgotten Expansion    KW4ZZ-KITEV-6N9T9
Age of Empires II DLC, original game needed
Company of Heroes                    QB00Y-G7AHR-LYYD2
 
SMITE Loki Pack                        PCLK345D9E7E50602
SMITE Xbox One Closed Beta                KRM4P-FHYKX-9GX27-VG2KC-VGVVZ
World of Tanks Invite Code                RMSZD-XB46S-54NH2-2YHYC
World of Warships Closed Beta Key            F93KM-Z36RY-AS5A4-M2PTN    on the North American (NA) server only.
World of Warships Bonus Content                M539B-FT4DV-NZBEP-X9CYP    on the North American (NA) server only.
Warframe 7-day Credit and Affinity Booster Packs    E1AE-3F85-5D3A-EED3
Twitch Turbo                        M288GCZDRNPZFFKD    Code expires 7/1/2016.
WildStar Standard Edition                GKDB0X2CU4G7QT3UM0VB    This key expires on 12/31/2015.
 
I hope I can make some of you happy with one or more keys
 
Post a comment below if you used a key, this to make it easier for all of us.

Win10 will probably ask if you want to remove it and replace it with the damn Bing bar instead

i c wut u did thar

"The bomb has been planted"

"Do as we say, not as we do."
 
Probably someone have said it before me but I think it's appropriate

^ This. I'd like to see them attempt overclocking a gpu or cpu. glhf. *Maxes every slider thinking that's all you do killing the card*

this honestly looks like some 8th graders "what if" project
in which he received a D on

once you go 2 you never go back
once you go 3 you never go back
once you go 4 you never go back
 
seriously, now everytime i am on another person's computer and they don't have at least 2 monitors i'm like WTF, where do i put all these windows?