Once again, that old issue of reflashing LSI cards

[Chuck Munro]

This topic has been beaten almost to death in the past, but I'm having a problem trying to reflash a brand new 9240-8i downward to the 9211 IT mode. I have run tests on three different motherboards, both with and without UEFI boot.

First ... all three motherboards boot up with the LSI firmware awake and reporting it sees the 9240. The LSI configuration utility works as expected.

When I boot the DOS version of the flash tools on an older motherboard that has PAL support, the sas2flsh utility says it can't find any LSI cards.
When I boot into UEFI, the sas2flash.efi utility reports the same problem ... no cards found.

This is puzzling, and i have tried different versions of the LSi utilities, all of which don't see the card. I am currently running four TrueNAS servers with LSI 9211 cards in IT mode, and those were reflashed with no issues several years ago, back when the 9211 was still being sold. They are running the P20 release of firmware with no issues at all.

So I'm wondering if TrueNAS version 12.0U7 would be safe enough to run with the 9240 in its native JBOD mode. A lot of postings offer warnings about doing it, but most of those are several years old by now. My question is ... does up-to-date TrueNAS support the 9240 in its native JBOD mode without any problems?

Or ... does anyone know how to force sas2flash to recognize the new LSI card. I am reluctant to empty the card's ID with Megarec in case I end up with a bricked card.

Any suggestions are most welcomed. Thanks, Chuck

 

[jgreco]

Where did you get this "brand new 9240" from?

 

[Chuck Munro]

Where did you get this "brand new 9240" from?

That is a key question. I got it from NewEgg just a couple of weeks ago. The board looked new, unused, and was properly packaged in an anti-static pack, not even any scuff marks on the PCIe pins. But ... it was shipped from China, which means it could be old stock or a copycat. The board's firmware reports exactly what I would expect, but it's possible the area of the flash rom that contains the manufacturer's ID is empty or set to some other OEM ID, which might explain why sas2flash can't see it. I wonder if an older version of sas2flash (before they started checking ID) would work? My non-UEFI motherboard would let me run it under DOS.

The card wakes up and runs its firmware GUI menu fine, and there is a JBOD setting (they call it "without redundancy"). I'm hoping the BSD driver for this board would offer solid stability for use with ZFS and JBOD, but I would really prefer to reflash to 9211 IT mode.

Is it possible for Megarec to flash the proper ID if I could find the LSI SBR file somewhere? Can Megarec do the entire reflash job or does it require a different format firmware file? I find it curious that some instructions ask for Megarec to load an empty ID file, in which case how does sas2flash find the card?

 

[jgreco]

it was shipped from China,

This is very suspicious. LSI got sold to Avago, which then got sold to Broadcom, and the 6Gbps product line was sold in the channel a full decade ago. 12Gbps came to market eight or nine years ago now (2013? 2014?), and new retail 6Gbps cards became hard to find. I believe that there was a bit of a long tail on the product, just because it was a dominant player and there were probably some contractual availability issues to certain OEM's, but nine years later is quite the tail. I talk about this in

Hardware Buying Guide - some tips for not getting ripped off

I've been giving this information out piecemeal for years, and should maybe have it summarized in one place. There's been a lot of people who are wary of secondary market sources for hardware, such as eBay, due to bad experiences with other...

www.truenas.com

which was precipitated by the pervasiveness of this issue.

I'm hoping the BSD driver for this board would offer solid stability for use with ZFS and JBOD, but I would really prefer to reflash to 9211 IT mode.

No, neither the BSD nor the Linux driver are appropriate.

What's all the noise about HBAs, and why can't I use a RAID controller?

1) An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. This is a controller that allows SAS and SATA devices to be attached to, and communicate directly with, a server. RAID controllers typically aggregate several disks into a Virtual Disk abstraction of some sort...

www.truenas.com

"JBOD modes" are not an acceptable substitute for actual HBA IT firmware. The 9240 in particular uses the disastrous MFI firmware, which should be avoided at all costs.

 

[Chuck Munro]

I'm happy to say the problem is solved! Since the card was not recognized by sas2flsh, I decided perhaps it needed to be reflashed using the method for converting recycled IBM OEM cards to LSI 9211 ... and it worked.

The key was to use MegaRec to empty the SBR info, and to completely erase flash. Then for some odd reason, sas2flsh had no problems reflashing to 9211 IT mode, which is what I really wanted. On boot, the card now clearly identifies itself as a 9211 IT.

It would seem the LSI cards are a bit more difficult to brick than I had thought, although powering down or rebooting the computer before completing all of the reflash steps could trash it.

Your description of the LSI/Avago/Broadcom history was rather interesting. Because eBay can be risky, I used NewEgg as the source to make defective returns easier. Not the lowest price but the card was definitely unused, possibly rebranded LSI.

Happy camper

 

[jgreco]

That's a little strange, as the 9240 was supposed to pop over quite easily to HBA mode. This may have required tooling available from LSI download that are no longer there, though. It was ostensibly the reason that the 9211-8i was not generally sold in the retail channel; LSI was able to get more dollars for the 9240, which was literally the exact same card.

although powering down or rebooting the computer before completing all of the reflash steps could trash it.

Don't think I've actually seen that happen, especially seeing as how rebooting several times is a critical step in the process for some cards. Done well north of a hundred cards of various types, M1015, H200, H310, LSI, etc. The failed cards I've seen have come INTO the shop in a broken state, at least as far as I can think of at the moment. Crossflashing is often a prickly, platform-dependent experience, especially in the early days, but bricking? Rare at best.