sysadmin

LSI 9211-8i Firmware upgrade IR to IT

Phil Kauffman

• 1 min read
LSI 9211-8i Firmware upgrade IR to IT

About 6 months ago I got a new HBA for one of my servers and went through a somewhat ridiculous process of flashing the firmware so that it only acts as an HBA... meaning no hardware RAID.

The research culminated in finding a thread with some very good instructions.

LSI/Avago doesn't make it easy, as they distribute if you are on Linux or FreeBSD. Wanting to make it easier on future me I posted a response that included all the files required.

Unfortunately, I forgot to include a couple things I learned back then and brings us to the reason for this post.

Step by step:

  1. Ignore all the installers that claim they can install from Linux or FreeBSD(I tested both. Windows is an unknown.).

  2. Get yourself a USB drive and install FreeDOS.

  3. wget http://ftp.chtaube.eu/pub/FreeDOS/bootable-usb/FreeDOS-1.1-memstick-2-2048M.img.bz2

  4. bunzip2 FreeDOS-1.1-memstick-2-256M.img.bz2

  5. dd if=FreeDOS-1.1-memstick-2-256MB.img of=/dev/sdz bs=512k

  6. sync

  7. Remount the disk

  8. Mount the newly made USB drive and copy the following files to the root of the USB drive:

  • 2118it.bin
  • mptsas2.rom
  • sas2flsh.exe
  1. Boot from the USB drive and get to a DOS prompt.
  2. Erase most of the flash. Do not use erase level 7. sas2flash -o -e 6
  3. Flash the firmware and BIOS updates: sas2flash -o -f 2118it.bin -b mptsas2.rom
  4. Was the flash successful? sas2flash -list