mR_CaESaR

So after a couple of hours worth of tinkering.... I HAVE SUCCESSFULLY UPDATED THE FW OF MY M1015!!! YAY!! Here's the story (for those that want to read ) So I gave up on trying to flash it on my "garage" jbod setup, it just wouldn't get to the BIOS but it allowed me to see it in windows (at first) like in my previous screen shots. I tried my IBM Thinkcentre M58 small form factor workstation again without the hdd and dvd rom - could load the BIOS and I could get into it after POST, but I had absolutely no luck getting the USB to boot I then tried an older PC that I had, since it had a video card in the first pci-e x16 slot, I tried it on the second one. Like the "garage" pc, it wouldn't load up the BIOS, it wouldn't even flash the LEDs on the card, took it out tried again, nothing. I then went back to the garage pc and tried it without the hdds and dvd rom, still nothing, no more LEDs, can no longer get "ServerRAID M1015" icon in device manager - I START PANICKING! I took out the card and noticed there were what looked like chips of copper from the connection, at this point I'm thinking "crap I just bricked this card by being too rough". Just to confirm, the ever faithful google images showed that those "chipped" copper sections were actually normal so I went back to the thinkcentre and low and behold the card is still working... phew. Was about to give up and call it a day until I remembered that my HTPC has got a pci-e x16 slot that i should be able to test.. Booted up, could see the firmware - great sign! From here on end, it's just a simple 1, 2, 3 boot, 5IT, 6 courtesy of everything in the "LSI MegaRAID to SAS2008(P11).zip" files. After completing the flashing, I then tried it back in the garage - still nothing. I've now come to terms that that PC is seriously screwed up for this card. Tried it on the Thinkcentre, as soon as windows loaded, it installed the software and BANG! I've now got an "LSI Adapter, SAS2 2008 Falcon" showing in my device manager as well as a whole new BIOS. I'm guessing that I have successfully changed the f/w of my M1015 right and made it a proper HBA card? Should it be showing "LSI Adapter, SAS2 2008 Falcon" under device manager (for those that use it in windows?) - I am merely preparing this card to be a HBA for my NAS build. Also note, all my PC's bar the thinkcentre were all Gigabyte motherboards. madburg, did you still want me to upload the SBR? It'll just be another IBM M1015, but if you still want it, I'd be happy to upload it.

hey guys, Firstly thanks to OP and all the others that have contributed to this thread, it's been really helpful, especially for SAS controller n00bs like myself. I thought I'd share my experiences with the IBM M1015. I recently purchased one to use as a HBA controller for my NAS build I currently have an old pc setup as a JBOD tower and it refuses to load up bios of the controller, it's a old Gigabyte K8N51GMF-RH. I managed to load a driver for windows, however the following was received: And I downloaded the pack LSI MegaRAID to SAS2008(P11).zip - 5.87 MB and tried flashing the controller, I got errors saying something like initialization failed but it wasn't the same message as the above poster. I should've taken a photo or something. I tried putting the controller in another computer and low and behold, the controller bios appeared, but the crappy thing was I couldn't get it to boot from a USB drive (apparently lenovo thinkcentre's don't like to boot from anything other then a hdd or a dvd). I've got two more computers that I can try it on, hopefully I am successful with one of em..