LSI Controller FW updates IR/IT modes

[FingerlessGloves]

1 minute ago, Squid said:

@Fireball3:

 

I successfully crossflashed a PERC200, using the EFI scripts.  I did elect to not bother with installing the BIOS onto the card.  But, I think that I would actually like to have the BIOS present.

 

To install the BIOS, do I just start over again and rerun 1.nsh, etc?

Which guide did you follow?

[Squid]

12 minutes ago, Jonny said:

Which guide did you follow?

Followed the onscreen directions for EFI.  Everything works perfectly, just decided after the fact to get the BIOS, and as cheap as I paid for the card ($10 US  shipped from CAN), don't want to take a chance on bricking it.

 

 

Toolset_H310H200_2_LSI9211_P20.00.07.00_v4.zip

Edited June 17, 2017 by Squid

[FingerlessGloves]

3 minutes ago, Squid said:

Followed the onscreen directions for EFI.

 

 

Toolset_H310H200_2_LSI9211_P20.00.07.00_v4.zip

Just go in to the 5_LSI_P20 Folder and do

sas2flash.efi -l flogP20.txt -o -f 2118it.bin -b MPTSAS2.ROM

 

no need to start from the beginning.

[jrdnlc]

Anyone have the latest IT firmware for a LSI 9201-16i card?

[JorgeB]

7 hours ago, jrdnlc said:

Anyone have the latest IT firmware for a LSI 9201-16i card?

 

https://www.broadcom.com/support/download-search

[jrdnlc]

 
https://www.broadcom.com/support/download-search

I checked there. The 9201-16i is not on the list only the 9202-16e.

[JorgeB]

I checked there. The 9201-16i is not on the list only the 9202-16e.

It is, choose legacy

[jrdnlc]

4 hours ago, johnnie.black said:

 

It is, choose legacy

 

 

Got it. Thanks for the help!

[kifysara]

Hey all,

 

I just tried flashing my IBM ServeRAID M1015 card, using the tools kindly provided by @Fireball3, but I get the "No LSI SAS adapters found!" error on FreeDOS (during the 1st step).

 

I am attaching a pic from the card's initialization phase during boot, which shows its current status.

Any workarounds/ideas?

[Fireball3]

Can you PM me the logs from within the logs directory?

[BlueHeisenberg]

Hi guys, I'm having a problem trying to flash a Del Perc 6/i into IT mode. I removed the heatsink and its a LSI 1078 chipset so I tfirst tried the LSI SAS1068E windows files from the second @madburg post but sas2flash didn't recognize it in windows and linux.

 

Then I found the LSI MegaRAID with SAS2008 chipsets post that says that they can be converted, and also found some other similar stuff online so I ended up with a lot of different versions and ended up with a dos usb boot where I managed to read the board with MegaCli and read all the info from the card (attached to this post but deleted the SAS address) and the did a backup of the SBR data. Then following the next step flashed what seems to be a dummy sbr file so I can flash a "not original firmware" an asked me to restart to flash the new firmware.

 

The problem is that after that sbr dummy flash the board BIOS doesn't show up at start and none of the apps seems to detect the card... have I bricked my card? or at least can I recover from the backuped SBR file?

 

Thanks!

ADAPTERS.TXT

[Fireball3]

https://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=49613.msg475716#msg475716

 

The Perc 6/i is not convertible to IT mode.

 

Try to get the 1078 IR firmware (preferably the DELL software) to recover the card.

[RParkerMU]

False alarm

 

Edited August 4, 2017 by RParkerMU

[Fireball3]

Hi,

welcome to the unRAID forums.

Can you please PM me a screenshot of your problem?

[RParkerMU]

Pm'd

[Taddeusz]

I have an IBM M1015 card that I long ago converted to a 9211-8i. It was running for a long time in a Windows environment with no issues. When I converted over to unRAID I decided to upgrade the firmware to the latest version, P20. I seemed to always have weird performance problems using the card. When there is a lot of write activity to the array (during network transfers directly to the array or moving files between array drives) overall system performance comes to a crawl and all my vm's and docker applications become unresponsive till the operation completes.

 

A couple months ago I took that card out and connected all the drives to the motherboard and a couple 2 port SATA cards and performance improved dramatically although copying files to the array across the network still causes some weird performance penalties but nothing like it was though.

 

It just bugs me that I can't use that card because I don't think there's anything that would keep it from performing well unless I just have a bad card. Yesterday I decided to do a little research and have discovered that some people are saying that the P20 firmware has an impact on performance and that going back to the P19 firmware fixes it. Last night I put the card in one of my other systems and downgraded the firmware to P19 (and took the opportunity to not flash the BIOS on since I don't need to boot from it). Haven't yet had the chance to swap cards around again since it's a fairly involved process with the cables.

 

My system while kind of dated now isn't exactly slow. Running dual Xeon L5430 CPU's on a Supermicro X7DWE motherboard with 24GB of DDR2 fully buffered RAM. My only concern about the system itself is that due to the platform it's running fully buffered memory which is higher latency than standard DIMM's. But I'm not certain that by itself would cause that much of a performance impact. Had I the money I would go buy all new hardware but this system has been performing well enough for my family's needs since I built it.

 

My question is, has anyone else had this experience with the P19/P20 firmwares or is this just internet folklore?

[Fireball3]

P19 is working fine.

Also P20.00.07 is OK.

There was an issue with P20.00.00 IIRC. Something about data corruption. Can't remember having read about performance issues. Did you check cables?

[AlexCherny]

My best regards and please help me if possible!

I have bought new HP StorageWorks LTO-4 Ultrium 1760 SAS Tape Drive and HP SC44Ge (LSI 3442e). I saw that firmware of my SC44Ge is old enough - 1.23.42.00-IR dated 2008/05/14

So I have tried to rewrite this firmware to new - FW:1.33.00.00, BIOS 6.36.00.00 / 22-AUG-11 (LSI P21)

So I downloaded LSI SAS1068E Controllers(P21).rar - 1.46 MB (Windows), unpack it, read it and start 2_Backup_Current_Firmware_&_Bios_x64.bat at first. I got 1068E-Backup-BIOS.rom and 1068E-FW-Backup.fw files.

After this I started 3_Flash_to_IR_mode_x64.bat (see attached Flashlog.txt) - no problem, firmware of controller was changed (see attached AdaptersCurrentFW-Bios.txt and AdaptersAfterFW-Bios.txt).

But after restart of PC my Ultrium tape drive was lost. I cannot see it anywhere. Neither during initializing SC44Ge, nor in Windows (i have Win7 64 bit home edition).

I have made conclusion that HP does not allow such operation.

So i have tried - I used 1068E-Backup-BIOS.rom against mptsas.rom and 1068E-FW-Backup.fw against 3081ERB3.fw

and have tried to run command line "sasflash_x64.exe -l Flashlog.txt -o -f 1068E-FW-Backup.fw -b 1068E-Backup-BIOS.rom"

But operation was aborted due "Cannot move backwards from NVDATA version 2D03 to 2B89". (see attached Flashlog2.txt)

Have I lost this controller? What can I do to make my tape drive alive again?

Sorry for my poor english.

Oleksandr

Flashlog.txt

AdaptersAfterFW-Bios.txt

AdaptersCurrentFW-Bios.txt

Flashlog2.txt

[Fireball3]

Hi, welcome to the unRAID forums.

I cannot download the mediafire link at this location, but if you took it from a post in this forum, it probably contains an IT mode firmware.

The unRAID OS, which is the main topic in this forum, needs controllers in IT mode.

Your original firmware seems to be IR mode. Maybe this is the reason of your disappeared tape drive.

You should search the LSI/Avago site for an up-to-date IR firmware for your controller and give it a try.

Also, firmware flashing is best done on DOS.

[AlexCherny]

For information.

What I've done:

1) I moved HP SC44Ge to another computer (there was an error "Failed to initialize PAL" on my PC, googled this error, there is problem with my MB)

2) Created DOS-USB key, added to key soft for rewriting version 1.26 and copies of old FW & BIOS

3) Boot from DOS 

4) Erase FW and BIOS by "sasflash -o -e 6"

5) Rewrite with my FW & BIOS. Everything was well

6) Rewrite with more fresh FW & BIOS. No problem!

[Harro]

Need some advise or help on this. Started having problems with my server.

Per Johnnie.Blacks advise I am trying to upgrade the firmware of my controllers to p20. I have a launch EFI from a system device in the asrock uefi utility. I plug in my usb with the

files I got from SAS 9207 . I get  into the shell and dir to fs0 dir and proceed to use x64sas2.efi  -listall and am greeted with image is not an application. 

Dunno this may/probably be over my head. 

 

[DanielCoffey]

I have just examined the Firmware and BIOS in a LSI SAS9201-8i that I picked up off eBay and it is reported as follows in the unRAID syslog.txt...

 

Quote

 

Sep  2 20:07:48 Tower kernel: mpt2sas_cm0: LSISAS2008: FWVersion(11.00.00.00), ChipRevision(0x03), BiosVersion(07.11.00.00)

 

 

 

 

I assume this means it is using FW11 and has BIOS  07.11. I have checked the Legacy HBA section of the Broadcom site and couldn't see a 9201-8i listed. Which is the equivalent entry I am looking for please? Is it the 9201-16i or the 9211-8i?

Edited September 2, 2017 by DanielCoffey
typo

[BobPhoenix]

This is my HP H310 or IBM M1015 (I have several of each and not sure which this was):

Aug 25 05:26:57 VMServer kernel: mpt2sas_cm0: LSISAS2008: FWVersion(18.00.00.00), ChipRevision(0x03), BiosVersion(07.31.00.00)

My LSI-9201-16i's look like this:

Aug 25 05:26:57 VMServer kernel: mpt2sas_cm1: LSISAS2116: FWVersion(19.00.00.00), ChipRevision(0x02), BiosVersion(07.37.00.00)

I would believe a 9211-8i is what you want but I wouldn't try it without advise from someone that has upgraded the firmware on a 9201-8i first.  I could be wrong.

[Harro]

On 9/1/2017 at 0:00 PM, Harro said:

Need some advise or help on this. Started having problems with my server.

Per Johnnie.Blacks advise I am trying to upgrade the firmware of my controllers to p20. I have a launch EFI from a system device in the asrock uefi utility. I plug in my usb with the

files I got from SAS 9207 . I get  into the shell and dir to fs0 dir and proceed to use x64sas2.efi  -listall and am greeted with image is not an application. 

Dunno this may/probably be over my head. 

After much google and many, many different files, I have decided that this is the best I can do on my HP H220 cards.Version:15.10.10.00 (17 Apr 2017) from the HP site. 

I did all the changes in UEFI shell. That download is an .exe file but with 7 zip you can extract it to a folder and pull the H220_it.fw and mptsas2.rom. Put those into your bootable usb along with Shellx64.efi and sas2flash.efi . My m/b can boot into the shell. Once booted in shell, type "fs0:" well it was for me but your usb might be different. Once in FS0: type "sas2flash -list" will show you all the adapters. To be on the safe side I had taken out all but the one adapter I was flashing and had no connections to hard drives attached to it. 

So now I flash with "sas2flash -o -f h220_it.fw -b mptsas2.rom" and hope all goes well which it did. Try "sas2flash -list" again and now see my firmware is V15.10.10.00 . Shut down and place my other adapter in and do the same.. Done I hope. 

[DanielCoffey]

@BobPhoenix You were correct - it was the 9211-8i broadcom package that I wanted for both the firmware and bios for my 9201-8i. Provided you use the IT mode firmware it is fine. I now have the correct firmware and bios on my card.