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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