An update to my last post:
This was super easy once I used the 9207-IT firmware for my HP 9217-4i4e SAS controllers - go figure.
1) I did a deep dive on the spec PDFs of both the 9207 and 9217 and didn't notice any difference between the two, the 9207 is PCIe 3.0 x8 unlike I suspected (as the 9201 is PCIe 2.0 so I was thinking 920x devices were PCIe 2.0 but doesn't seem to be the case on the 9207 or HP 9217-4i4e which uses the 9207-4i4e IT firmware, but uses 9217-IR firmware - weird af...)
2) As I alluded, the 9207 firmware is the correct IT firmware for the HP branded 9217-4i4e card, it works without issue, unlike the broadcom-downloaded firmware for 9217-4i4e for whatever reason (I'm guessing HP OEM but really not sure). Obviously there's a chipset mismatch between the HP OEM 9217 and LSI retail 9217 (the HP is a SAS2308 or 0x87)
3) you can flash multiple cards by using the
-c flag, e.g. I had two cards in my X9SCL-F,
sas2flash.efi -listallboards produced result of
0 and /ICODE]1[/ICODE] controller numbers, respectively
I could run the following
Code:
# for the first card:
sas2flash.efi -c 0 -o -f 9207-4i4e.bin -b mptsas2.rom
# and then for the second card:
sas2flash.efi -c 1 -o -f 9207-4i4e.bin -b mptsas2.rom
So you don't have to pull the cards out and do them in the motherboard one by one - helpful if you have a gang of them to do at a time, like I did - I had 3, and did the first one by itself as recommended by most posts, but thought there had to be a better way after seeing how long the whole process took. The
-listallboards flag helps, but it'd be pretty easy to guess
{0..n} if those were all you had in your board.
If this hasn't given you any errors, I'm guessing you're all good - reboot and set INT19 postponed and your OPROM for the PCIe card on for whatever bootloader type you're using (probably UEFI if you're using the EFI software for flashing). Oh, and make sure BIOS is set to force add-on firmware. These are usually in the boot options menu (the first submenu under "advanced" options menu on my supermicro board).
Then you'll get the menu when you start up the computer where you can hit CTRL-A and checkout your options in the bios menu (sometimes you even get a menu inside the motherboard's bios, which is cool).
If you do get a weird result, error or something, and haven't done any prep, you might want to erase the pre-existing firmware first. Like, if this process I just detailed gives you some kind of error.
I had already trashed my NVRAMs in freedos using
megarec.exe before I got the
PAL mismatch error and needed to use UEFI firmware instead. But if you're just getting into this, you probably want to start here (I'm just guessing, as it was not the path I took, obviously).
I'm assuming you could erase multiples the same way using :
Code:
# for the first card:
sas2flash.efi -c 0 -o -e 7
# and then for the second card:
sas2flash.efi -c 1 -o -e 7
If 7 doesn't work, try 6. I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure this either has to do with NVRAM position or PCIe bus. That's a pretty big discrepancy, but in practice it doesn't really matter - if 7 gives you an error, just try 6.
Then go back and try and flash again. Good luck everyone.
However upon trying to use lsitutil (after getting dos4gw, I'm on freedos)
