[LSI Controller FW updates IR/IT modes]

I have solved my cross flashing issue. But not after my favorite mainboard brand Gigabyte disappointed me.

 

I learned how easy it is to make a USB pendrive EFI bootable. Just drop this binary into that flash drive FAT's root directory and rename it to <shellx64.efi>.

Also, from Roderick W. Smith's site rodsbook.com I learned that Gigabyte's Hybrid EFI implementation is one of the worst that Mr Smith has encountered. So, if you have a Gigabyte mainboard forget EFI Shell, it probably won't work. It has cost me several hours today.

 

I eventually solved it by inserting the LSI 9240-8i into the PCI Express x16 slot of an Asrock H81 Pro BTC mainboard. (A mainboard I almost forgot I still own. A relic from my scrypt mining days.) After entering the BIOS and going to the last menu "Exit", I selected the bottom option "Launch EFI Shell from filesystem device". It gave me a <SHELL> prompt. I selected my USB pendrive by typing "FS0:". I browsed to the location of my sas2flash.efi, 2118it.bin and mptsas2.rom files and executed the following two commands;

sas2flash -o -f 2118it.bin -b mptsas2.rom
sas2flash -o -sasadd 500605b0xxxxxxxx (replace the xx's with the SAS address from your card)

 

Identical to BetaQuasi's M1015 Cross flashing instructions except that I used <sas2flash.efi> instead of <sas2flsh.exe>.

Unraid 5.0.5 has identified the card and the attached drives. I'm a happy camper ! ;-)

 

Thanks for this post, it got me pointed in the right direction. I just want to add what I did to get my 9240-8i flashed on a Lenovo TS140. This will probably work on other systems that don't have a boot to efi shell boot option:

• use the first page of BetaQuasi's M1015 Cross flashing instructions as a guide
  
• create the bootable USB key as described
  
• grab the latest 9211-8i package from LSI's web site (as of this writing P19)
  
• replace the 2118it.bin and mptsas2.rom files on the USB key with the ones in the package you just downloaded
  
• create a directory structure \efi\boot\ on the USB key
  
• copy <usb>:\Shell_Full.efi to <usb>:\efi\boot\bootx64.efi
  
• set bios on system to uefi only
  
• boot from USB key
  
• the system should boot to the efi shell
  
• from the shell type fs0: to get to the root of the USB key were all the files are
  
• continue following the M1015 Cross flashing instructions