Howdy folks, I recently acquired a Dell Precision 7910 tower (TZ7910) for free as salvage, and currently have it kitted out with an E5-2650 v3 and 64 Gb of RAM for future VM experimentation and starting a homelab. I've flashed a few H200s, H710s, and misc. PERC cards in the past so I'm somewhat familiar (if rusty) with sas2flsh and megarec. My current issue is that according to forum posts and a few old videos on the 9341-8i I need to short jumper TP12 in order to crossflash from IR to IT, and since the controller is integrated into the board it doesn't have that jumper as far as I can see. I was wondering if my vision is bad, if there's some test pads I need to solder bridge on the back of the board, or if I'll have to give up and make a RAID 0 array for each drive I plan on installing. I'd rather avoid using one of my existing IT-flashed cards since I won't have the PCIe to spare with my current shopping list of networking/IO.

 

Here's photos of the controller info and the corner of the motherboard where the controller is located:

You don't need a jumper, it is only for certain models of the card. Not sure if your Dell supports UEFI, but you can also use a Freedos USB that you can make with Rufus. You'll need the BIOS and sas3flash from here, and the firmware from here (the firmware from Broadocom has a bug with SATA drives).

 

Assuming you're using an EFI-shell, you use sas3flash, if you're using DOS, it will be sas3flsh. You already got a copy of the SAS-address in this post, but make sure to write it down somewhere in case you need to put it back. The following commands should not erase it though.

 

First erase the flash:

sas3flash -c 0 -o -e 6

Then to program the firmware:

sas3flash -c 0 -o -f filename -b mptsas3.rom -b mpt3x64.rom

(assuming you want the legacy and UEFI bios files as well, otherwise you'd just do the -f filename part.)

 

Now do:

sas3flash -list

to verify the flash worked, and if it forgot the address

sas3flash -o -sasadd 51866XXXXXXXXXXXX

(replace 51866XXX with the actual address of course)

Edited February 16, 20251 yr by Wody

Thanks for the info, and for all the commands too; controller still works and the drives are present as expected. For anyone who stumbles across this in the future: the 7910 uses a legacy BIOS so only mptsas3.rom is needed, although there isn't much to tune in IT mode so I wouldn't bother wasting boot time.