IBM M1015 Firmware - What to flash with

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BigBadJohnnyB

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Jan 8, 2013
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Metaluna, PigLover and mobilenvidia - thank you very much for the replies. Clears up some confusion. :)

PigLover brings up a good point, perhaps the right course of action is to get a "real" one and an IBM to play with on the cheap, and to keep on the shelf as a spare.

Guys - thanks again. I'm sure others have said what you said various numbers of times throughout the thread, but the concise responses you provided really cleared it up.
 

PigLover

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Jan 26, 2011
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That was not my suggestion atall. I see absolutely no advantage in buying a 'real' 9211 and an M1015 as a spare. Just get the cheaper one and if you are concerned about not having a warranty then buy another one as a spare.

Paying a >200% premium just to have the original LSI box is just silly.
 

Aluminum

Active Member
Sep 7, 2012
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That was not my suggestion atall. I see absolutely no advantage in buying a 'real' 9211 and an M1015 as a spare. Just get the cheaper one and if you are concerned about not having a warranty then buy another one as a spare.

Paying a >200% premium just to have the original LSI box is just silly.
This

And if you want the best motherboard compatibility you can flash IT/HBA with no ROM, and no card will come that way out of the box.
Free bonus of faster booting, extra nice if you have a larger NAS with multiple cards. (if you have the slots it can be cheaper than an expander, potentially faster)

I'm sure they don't support ROM-less cards but you only need it to boot from or manage arrays, otherwise being addressable on a pci bus is all the OS needs to load a driver.
 

zicoz

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Jan 7, 2011
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Hi, I'm currently trying to flash a M1015, but it seemsas if it recognized as a SAS2008 card and not a 9211 card.

I get the following message when I run the sas2flsh command.

"adapter selected is an LSI SAS: SAS2008 (BZ)"

Am I doing something wrong?
 

mobilenvidia

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Sep 25, 2011
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SAS2008 is the controller chip that runs on:

LSI9200
LSI9201
LSI9202 (x2)
LSI9210
LSI9211
LSI9212
LSI9220 (IBM M1015)
LSI9240

So you are in the right place, ding the right thing

I think you should head on over here to get a better understanding of the controllers and what cards they come on.
 
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badatSAS

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Nov 7, 2012
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I just got an Intel RMS2AF080 for my S1200BTLR. Has RAID5 enabled, which is super except as we all know the SAS2008 without cache or battery is pretty useless.

So I think I'm going to take a whack at flashing it to an RMS2LL080, which as far as I can tell will give me pass-through of unconfigured good drives in addition to RAID 0/1/(1E or 10?), which I think is a 9211-IR equivilant? Should I grab the .sbr first?

Am I crazy?
 

mobilenvidia

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Sep 25, 2011
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Just cross flash your card to a LSI9211 in IR mode, no need to flash the SBR as in LSI9211 there is no SBR

BUT copy your SBR !! first so should you go back, you can

And yes RAID5 is a complete waste on a SAS2008, it's ssssslllllloooowwww
 

badatSAS

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Nov 7, 2012
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Fun night so far. Tried to flash to 9211 following your guide on ltv2g.com, hit the "PAL" error in DOS, booted in EFI shell and got the "failed to validate mfg page 2" when trying to flash the 9211 rom. Was able to flash the RMS2LL080 firmware without issue however, will see if this does what I need and if not i'll go for the 9211 again


** Confirmed the RMS2LL080 native firmware allows passthrough of unconfigured drives, so I'm just going to leave it as-is.

I noticed in RMS2AF080 mode it was willing to let me enter software feature keys, but it looks like in RMS2LL080 mode it will not as a note to anyone that may end up with one of these in the future.

Between the onboard SATA ports and the 8 added with this card, I have 14 SATA ports without even using a PCIe slot now.. of course I'm using them anyways
 
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mobilenvidia

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Sep 25, 2011
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OK you have a daugherboard SAS controller, possibly why the mfg error, you can get round this with an extra command switch
It still uses PCIe lanes (8 of them ?)

Thats good, you have IR mode with Intels version.
Should server you well

Interesting with the keys, do you remember what they were ?
 

badatSAS

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Nov 7, 2012
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It uses PCIe lanes, documentation seems confused whether it's using 8x lanes or 4x - both are listed in the same PDF spec. It coexisted without an issue with my Dell H700 in a 16x slot (8x electrical) and an H310 in an 8x slot (4x electrical), but may have made it so my USB3 PCIe adapter disappeared - I don't recall.

The original firmware for the RMS2AF080 had Megaraid RAID5 activated - I hope that's not lost if I flash back =)

Could I have typed in a CacheCade 2.0 trial code into the box?

Whether or not that would have been possible - would a cachecade 2.0 enabled RAID5 card with no cache/battery "seem" fast due to caching to SSD and handling the parity calculations.. later?
 
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mobilenvidia

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No cachecade needs a cache to function, even a RAID controller with no cache = no cachecde.
You may have seen the SED key, drive encryption.
You don't get SSD caching with the SAS2008 or fastpath.

The keys will come back when you flash the original card FW back.
 

wrigleyvillain

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Oct 19, 2012
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This card simply is not flashable in my intended system (Asus p5w-dh deluxe) which is ok because it did finally flash 100% ok and tested working fine in my asus maximus extreme.
Had the same issue in my P55 FTW and so glad I found this post as I might have otherwise thought I bricked it. Tried it in an old HP Core 2 Duo desktop at work but it didn't like that either (and megarec gave a wonderful message about destroyed memory blocks in that box). Finally successfully flashed to LSI IR in an older HP Proliant server in our testlab there.
 

JimPhreak

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Oct 10, 2013
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Anyone gotten this card to work in Windows Server 2012 R2? I'm getting an I/O Adapter hardware error in device manager using the latest LSI9240 firmware.
 

JimPhreak

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Oct 10, 2013
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Turns out I had flashed the card with the stock IBM firmware (which doesn't support Windows) instead of flashing with the LSI-9211-8i IR firmware. Now it's working fine in Windows and the array is initializing :D. Thank goodness for IPMI so I could do this all from work haha.
 

Cemal

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Feb 28, 2017
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I have Dell UCS-70 I have wished to update firmware from LSI 9200-8E

I have done writesbr 0 and cleanflash 0 succesfully but when re-programming bios get error!

Error in downloading image.
Error code = 64
Failed to flash the image. Please retry recovery

What those mean? Can anyone help?