SAS9211-8I 8PORT Int 6GB Sata+sas Pcie 2.0

Product Information

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. For the ConnectX-2 cards, there is no more new firmware (even custom ones in this forum) even though Windows keep giving me warning messages in Event Viewer asking me to upgrade for certain features. But on the whole, earlier versions are better than latest versions for this bit, if you can find them easily, since the most consistently working LSI software for crossflashing is the early versions before about P7.

So you have no choice about whether to use MSDOS EFI versions, it's determined by the motherboard you're using.

I believe he was referencing the old card (9207) but it is still a good troubleshooting step, have you tried using both of the ports on the 9211-8i?

Failed to validate MfgPage2" which really means "Crossflash attempt blocked because your card isn't bought from LSI so we're going to be annoying" (the Vendor IDs in NVRAM and new firmware don't match) - this is why we're using a pre-P7 flasher for the crossflashing step, as the earlier flashers were as reliable but allowed crossflashing.Can I simply attach the orphaned SFF-8087 cable to that available port on the LSI to get the remaining 4 drives connected or will it not work because it's expecting an expander since there's an expander on the other port? This is a great package for compatible motherboards but it seems many new consumer-grade boards won’t work. It will give an understanding of the actual crossflash process, and why the "recipe" below is as it is. I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use, and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them. Enter your motherboard BIOS/setup panel and disable orom on boot for storage cards or for that specific card, if enabled (so the card's misflashed state can't interfere with proper booting).

in the case of FreeNAS, the driver for 2008/2308 is very mature and stable and because it is so broadly used by the community, if you ever ask for help about it you'll have plenty of people that can share their opinion. We only used the P5 version to allow crossflashing to LSI and to allow flashing of non-LSI firmware, if that succeeded then we don't need it any more.

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. 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. I'm about to flash my IBM ServeRAID M1015 to IT mode with your guide and I'm a bit unsure regarding the UEFI shell. 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.