jkm9000

Indeed it was. I had unzipped the file via Finder (Lion). Turns out when you do it that way there is no trace of empty.bin! Once I unzipped via the command line, the file was there and I was able to reflash the card (yay). Might be worth adding a note to the OP for mac users. I view this as a bug in OS X. Thanks for your help I think I'm set. Update - I've moved the 4 drives that were on my SAT2-MV8 to the new card and my initial parity check speeds have gone from 25 MB/sec to nearly 90 MB/sec. Huge gain, thanks much!

Thanks, but I've actually tried 2 intel boards, both with the PAL error. The AMD board gives me something different so I'm hoping it's resolvable without trying a 4th board.

Finally got around to trying this with a different motherboard - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138283 I no longer get the PAL error, so that's something, instead when I run 5it.bat or 5ir.bat or even sas2flsh I get the error that no LSI Adapters can be found. I grabbed version 1.24 that was referenced here, same problem. I grabbed 4 versions of sas2flash for linux, and all 4 give me the same problem. Following the procedure kkm posted (page 2) I was able to restore the card, and tried all steps again. Same problem that no LSI Adapters can be found. I also noticed that 3.bat refers to empty.bin which is not in the zipfile, not sure if this is related at all, just thought I would mention it. Am I at least close? Any ideas? Thanks much to all

Thanks all, I was almost ready to pull the trigger on this AMD board http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138283 but I noticed abq-pete had problems with the MSI 790FX-GD70, which is also an AMD board. So it seems that this problem is not only for intel chipsets. If there is a pattern to what works vs not, I'm not seeing it.

If someone could point me to a motherboard that is known to work without the PAL error I would be very grateful. Ideally something that works with an Intel E6300 CPU and DDR3 ram so I don't have to buy a processor and CPU. At this point I'm going to have to buy a motherboard to flash with, but I got a good deal on the card... Thanks!

That makes sense, the C2SEE is G43. Thanks.

Same error with the C2SEE Is it possible there is something else going on here or the only two motherboards I have won't work with this? Card is about to go out the window.

Thanks. Luckily I have a SuperMicro C2SEE and some spare parts so I can give that a try. Tried several versions of sas2flash for linux but none see that card although it shows up via lspci. So, I'm not giving up!

So I picked up a megaraid card (http://www.ebay.com/itm/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=160638242230) which was showing up during boot as: LSI MegaRAID SAS-MFI BIOS Version 4.24.00 (Build March 03, 2011) ... FW package: 20.10.1-0036 I then grabbed madburg's zip - LSI MegaRAID to SAS2008(P10).zip - 6.38 MB (DOS, via bootable usb key) and things went well until step 5. When I run either 5it or 5ir I get a message like PeterB reported: Failed to initialze PAL. Not really sure what to do at this point. I'm running on an Asus P8P67 PRO (Rev 3.1) if that matters. Since the previous step was to wipe the SBR and clear BIOS I'm sort of stuck. Any ideas? Thanks! EDIT - It runs this command sas2flsh.exe -l Flashlog.txt -o -f 2118it.bin -b mptsas2.rom but there is no Flashlog.txt written to the usb stick...