madburg

OS doesn't matter here, you didn't read the OP entirely

Everything is in the readme file with the LSI package

Grab a USB key, load a free version of unRAID on it, add the Linux (unRAID) LSI update package to the key as well. Disconnect your windows HD from the system for now. Boot up with the unRAID USB stick and run the LSI update steps.

Seller clearly states it is a m1015 (in that link) so it is flashable. My 2 cents they want to much for something they have not tested and cannot guarantee if they will work.

You CAN put a 3TB drive on that card, but it will only see 2.2 out of 3 TBs

Yes I personal have seen it come up as "LSI Adapter, SAS2 2008 Falcon" under Windows in my earlier testings. If u were to look at the HW id and match it within the driver inf file you would see the same, actually thats were it gets the friendly name from. Some have asked; the PAL errors were not know to me at the time I created what I hoped would work for all including beginners. From the amount of downloads compared to failures posted due to PAL errors that seems to be the case. As some posted it was discovered some motherboards are not good candidates to perform the flash with. So I never went back to add remarks about PAL issue in the read me files. Most people end up coming back to the forum when things don't work. I have not posted here much (just check in here and there), as not much (actually nothing) has changed with unRAID. So no point in wasting time with this or plugins, etc. When Tom decides to fill us in at the very least. And produce something, then there will be interest in posting/helping, etc. I dont make any sort of money from this product, just interest, but there isn't anything to be interested in as nothing has moved forward with the product. It's a shame.

87 pages and counting, we all have to chip in and purchase a crown for the man by the time this reaches the 100th page. Joe you should come up with a logo for preclear by then To be incorporated into future plug-ins

I just updated the OP (totally forgot, no one posted and I did not know at that time), 'Yes' to all three. I have some friends and know some a$$hole$ with these card's. They work just fine you will be happy.

Just give it a whirl, make sure you dont have prod data when testing 5.0Beta14 (you've been warned).

well low and behold. I was at the gas station this morning and noticed they had an old POS power spec machine. Asked if i could use it for a few minutes and 10 minutes later both cards flashed with no problems. Yup had to flash mine at the gas station! Might have to buy a power spec just to do firmware updates ( Now off to start configuring the rest of my ESXI install... I almost left over when I just read this. GOOD STUFF! Hear I am recommending use a friends, neighbors, work PC; whatever it takes. When clearly you can do it while filling up! LOL CONGRATS!

Sweet congrats, and thanks for sharing, may help others as well!

The first cards bios must post in order to marry the two (only one bios runs when multipule cards are used, that is why it is very important they all have the same Bios/FW flash on them). You will need to find a system that you can get into the cards Bios with... that may or may not help (as you would be placing them back into this system, which by the way what MB are you using, so other can let you know if they had success). As at the very least it needs to set the card(s) order.

Nope, its has not be meantioned before. Thanks for sharing your findings as it may help others with particular motherboards.

I dont know of anyone who officially bricked a card yet, I would keep trying other motherboards.

Sorry for the late reply, once you flash the bios/fw of a mega card to a non mega bios/fw, going forward just use the non mega updates. So in your case just use the "LSI SAS2008 Controllers(P11).rar" package.

Hard to tell. First I meantion in the notes, that step one's output log will contain your cards sas address. Should it not be in the log, then look for the sticker. What if you purchased a card with a missing sticker or it those not match what was set on the card. That is why I meantioned check your step 1 output log for the sas address. From what I know about SAS controllers "Systems identify SATA devices by their port number connected to the host bus adapter, while SAS devices are uniquely identified by their World Wide Name (WWN) aka SAS Address." Since we are attaching SATA Drives one would like to say your ok, but two cards with no address, just dont know... as if you watch unRAID boot it loads the driver, logs the Card model, sas address, how many ports and then executes a port enable command to get to the drives... Another issue can be, will the BIOS be OK trying to post these two card which to it are one and the same because they have no sas address? post those not know if your going to use SATA or SAS drives (nor does it care). Or maybe its ok, because each is in a different PCI-E slot address... dont know that level of detail, sorry. Let us know how you make out. Try to wipe the controllers bios again and add back the sas address for each.

Yeap, look out for anything in the bios, about "ADDON CARD" and Force Bios/ etc... good luck!

Sorry, I'm just a user FROM ServeTheHome who found this thread from their forums, just saying hi and thanking you for this thread. No worries, all the same, thanks for posting a reply

1) Added to the OP (BIG THANKS to KKM for creating the empty.bin, so you dont need to have to worry about which sbr to obtain and use.), sorry that I missed posting this a long time ago. Was not my intention to take any credit for his work. That was a big thing for all the people who wanted to wipe megaraid cards (which is alot from the download stats, positive many are non-unRAIDers as google searches point here) so give a big thanks to KKM if you wiped you megaraid card! 2) Updated OP with Philmatic screenshot. Thanks Phil, back when I was approaching unRAID I spent alot to time on your the site "ServeTheHome.com" to help me decided what hardware to buy that was ESXi compliant and would also hopefully work with unRAID. Then this post came about. Thank you for dropping a reply here! Thanks to Raj for sticking this thread up for all! Hopefully in the near future, I will put together all the responses of what boards the flashing does and does not work with and post on the OP for quick reading.

UPDATE: Added to the OPs Added LSI SAS1068E chipset (P21) both windows and unraid. Added LSI SAS2004 chipset (P11) both windows and unraid. Added LSI SAS2008 chipset (P11) both windows and unraid. Added LSI SAS2116 chipset (P11) both windows and unraid. Added LSI MegaRAID to SAS2008(P11) (DOS, via bootable usb key) Added NEW LSI SAS2 Series Flash via ESXi 5.0 Saw LSI published SAS2FLASH for ESXi 5.0, Its not digitially signed but +1 for them getting it put together. Now I was able to do a flash upgrade on my two controllers at once without having to pay a visit to my server rack. I never disconnected any of the drives hanging of the 2 controllers. In theory one mite be able to use the Linx package (I will post the P11 soon) and flash the controllers via the unRAID VM, so even less work (still need to reboot after a flash) but you would not need to stop pass-thru and add it back. Personally not my cup of tea but in theory it should work. I am adding the _Readme.txt notes to this post so no one has to download the package just to read up on whats involved. Not for beginners. The rest to the P11 packages will be completed soon. All done now, and posted. Observations of P11 FW, multipule controllers go past POST faster, port enable command issued via unRAID seems faster, no apparent issue with a few copies to the array. I will be testing futher this evening, rsync'ing larger amount of data. Large file copy to varies drives (old and new, 3tb, 2tb, 160gb, 320gb, etc.. Across 2 LSI controllers on P11) all succeeded. This is on 5.0Beta12a BTW. Started parity sync this evening (3tb parity, 14 data drives), i will see the result by tomorrow. So far so good. _README.txt

Plenty of reading, see attachments. Looks like plenty, for bios dual card fix, for firmware SATA fixes. FW is smaller in size, interesting... but Bios is larger. It wont be tonight but I am going to get this done for all soon. Yeap, there is a P21 for the 3081E cards (br10's) not much there it seems (few fix's nothing about 3TB support), but they did consolidate to 1 FW to support 1.5G/s, 3G/s & 6G/s SATA HDD (were before it was 2 FW's). So thats nice add as well. BIOS_Release_Notes_P11.txt Firmware_Release_Notes_P11.txt

+1 I am still testing till this day, not that I have had anytime in at least a month but starting back again. I will read up on the P11 FW and see if anything has changed, and look up on the 3081-R (BR10i's) as well and will share my thoughts. If its worth it I will post secondary downloads keeping the P10 up as well. To add as an example I run a 9211-8i and SAS9201-16i on one board and the 9211 was up to P10 while there was nothing avaible for the 9211 (just what came RTM FW) this was NOT a good match. Then LSI posted P11 for most of the 9200 series and that was night and day for the combination to be on the same FW. PeterB, glad to hear that P11 resolved your issue with that backplane. I am telling anyone to stay clear of P11 just not enought testing has been conducted with it nor a qoute "look they said it fixes x, y, z", so at the moment personally P10 is a safer bet, again I have not even read the release notes/change log yet.

Sorry, but no idea what exact card you are referring to. If you can post that info it would be helpful. Thanks.

+1

Hmmm ... it appears that I spoke too soon. After 17 hours, when the second drive was on its Post-Read, I'm starting to get: Oct 30 10:09:21 Tower kernel: sd 0:0:1:0: attempting task abort! scmd(f5a8d540) Oct 30 10:09:21 Tower kernel: sd 0:0:1:0: [sdh] CDB: cdb[0]=0x85: 85 06 20 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 40 e5 00 (Drive related) Oct 30 10:09:21 Tower kernel: scsi target0:0:1: handle(0x000a), sas_address(0x4433221101000000), phy(1) (Drive related) Oct 30 10:09:21 Tower kernel: scsi target0:0:1: enclosure_logical_id(0x50030480041f4c00), slot(2) (Drive related) Oct 30 10:09:21 Tower kernel: sd 0:0:1:0: task abort: SUCCESS scmd(f5a8d540) Previously, I would see these messages within seconds of starting the Pre-clear. However, this is on a suspect drive, with a transfer rate falling to less than 7MB/s. I've already discussed this drive in the past. SMART shows nothing untoward - the only symptoms I see are this dreadfully slow transfer rate at around 70-80% through the Pre-clear reads and, I guess, these strange error messages in the log. To RMA the drive (a WD10EADS), I would have to send it internationally from Philippines to Singapore. What version of unRAID were you running and preclear version against this drive at time of failure?