Perc H710 Mini to IT mode

[strongholdmedia]

Now to be honest about the thought of releasing the method vs keeping it secret and making bank, I just don't know.

To be honest, there are too many leeches. Everything that is currently free should be $0.99 so that leeches, aggregators and other social rejecta may not collect them for "future use" (nor brag about "having" them).
Nothing that is free is respected today.

That being said, I follow this thread for a while.
It is possible I've given out hints or even stuff, if I were to do this with open source tools.
Sadly, the signed firmware and partitioning the EFS requires approaches of the official utility.

Now giving it out in a patched/modified manner would be pretty much illegal everywhere.

If someone were to reverse it, to provide for EFS handling, it would be cool - but I don't see that in the foreseeable future.
It was even unfeasible for me for the two or so cards I had to process like half a year ago.

 

[fohdeesha]

We've successfully crossflashed an H710 mini with non Dell IT firmware, it really wasn't even difficult, I have no clue what strongholdmedia is on about. Will have a guide out in a week or two depending on time. And yes, it will be free

 

[strongholdmedia]

That is what I had to do after all to proceed with this.
I am also looking forward to any methods not using modified official tools.
(As a side note, the simplest would be not using Dell servers to do it at all. Then you could just do the H310 method with the offset thing written above; that would be enough.)

 

[Sleyk]

To be honest, there are too many leeches. Everything that is currently free should be $0.99 so that leeches, aggregators and other social rejecta may not collect them for "future use" (nor brag about "having" them).
Nothing that is free is respected today.

That being said, I follow this thread for a while.
It is possible I've given out hints or even stuff, if I were to do this with open source tools.
Sadly, the signed firmware and partitioning the EFS requires approaches of the official utility.

Now giving it out in a patched/modified manner would be pretty much illegal everywhere.

If someone were to reverse it, to provide for EFS handling, it would be cool - but I don't see that in the foreseeable future.
It was even unfeasible for me for the two or so cards I had to process like half a year ago.

We've successfully crossflashed an H710 mini with non Dell IT firmware, it really wasn't even difficult, I have no clue what strongholdmedia is on about. Will have a guide out in a week or two depending on time. And yes, it will be free

@strongholdmedia I confess, I'm not sure what you mean as well, my brother. But I do take your point on the availability of free things.

I think that this is true for certain things, as people have been known to sometimes abuse and misuse free things, but as I mentioned in my previous post, we are in a tech community my brother! If we didn't make some things freely available, alot of people would not be able to afford, much less try out these new methods. Remember, adding a pay for play barrier adds a component of exclusivity. If you pay, you get. If you don't pay, to hell with you. This I don't agree with.

I take joy in sharing. I commend @fohdeesha for his willingness to share. For me, the thought that people benefit from something I discovered is payment in of itself. Not to say you can't make a dollar, but I prefer to have the credit first, then a few bucks later.

 

[fohdeesha]

Between his word salad here and on a related GitHub issue telling us it's impossible (we literally already did it), he's either related to one of the crossflash sellers on eBay or trolling. If he tells me it's not possible one more time his name is going in the guide

 

[BeTeP]

LOL at @fohdeesha vs @strongholdmedia quibble in the github ticket comments. I am with @fohdeesha, the whole matter is rather trivial.
Just one more thing, no version of SBR was ever 256/512 bytes long. That's just an arbitrary number that megarec developers used for the dump buffer size.

Here is my code I used to dump SBR in linux using lsiutil before lsirec became available:

RESBR = re.compile(r'Offset:\s+[\dA-Z]{8}\s+([\dA-Z]{8})')

IOP_SHOW_SBR = b'''65

iop show sbr
exit
0
'''

def readsbr(port=1, copy=1):
    lsi = subprocess.Popen(['lsiutil', '-e', '-p', str(port)], stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stdin=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
    out = lsi.communicate(input=IOP_SHOW_SBR, timeout=2)[0].decode('ascii')
    sbr = bytearray(b''.join(int(x.group(1),16).to_bytes(4, byteorder='little') for x in RESBR.finditer(out) if x))
    size = len(sbr) // 2
    if copy == 1:
        return sbr[0:size]
    elif copy == 2:
        return sbr[size:]
    return sbr

 

[fohdeesha]

done

we're gunna spend the next couple days streamlining the process so it requires less reboots, but it's totally doable. Guide/script next week maybe? It's amazing how much faster I work when I have a bunch of weirdos spamming me with messages that it's impossible

 

[SirUffsALot]

Nice, what tool did you use to manipulate the sbr?
This was the showstopper for me, because sbrtool.py don't work with 512bytes SBRs.
I flashed a defective sbr and the server didn't boot afterwards, fortunately I could revive the controller with my ch341a programmer.

 

[Sleyk]

Lol! Hacktheplanet. Love it.

nice work @fohdeesha

 

[fohdeesha]

Nice, what tool did you use to manipulate the sbr?
This was the showstopper for me, because sbrtool.py don't work with 512bytes SBRs.
I flashed a defective sbr and the server didn't boot afterwards, fortunately I could revive the controller with my ch341a programmer.

We manually edited the SBR by cross-examining the stock dell SBR with our target SBR, from a 9207-8i (and from a 9205-8e, for B0 revision cards). My reply here on github has details along with instructions, but a much more complete and smoother guide will be out in a week or so after we script some of it reading SBR from 2208 shows the data to be offset by a few bytes · Issue #1 · marcan/lsirec

 

[Sleyk]

We manually edited the SBR by cross-examining the stock dell SBR with our target SBR, from a 9207-8i (and from a 9205-8e, for B0 revision cards). My reply here on github has details along with instructions, but a much more complete and smoother guide will be out in a week or so after we script some of it reading SBR from 2208 shows the data to be offset by a few bytes · Issue #1 · marcan/lsirec

Looks good. I'm looking forward to it as well. I'm working on something and could use some hints and pointers on how you manipulated the sbr as well. Great work Fohdeesh!

 

[BeTeP]

could use some hints and pointers on how you manipulated the sbr

You liked almost every other comment in this thread. Why won't you read them as well? There are 2 separate scripts already posted (by me on the 1st page and by @fohdeesha in the github ticket comments) which do the exact thing you are asking for.

 

[Sleyk]

You liked almost every other comment in this thread. Why won't you read them as well? There are 2 separate scripts already posted (by me on the 1st page and by @fohdeesha in the github ticket comments) which do the exact thing you are asking for.

You know, for those who read my initial post, i got super angry at this guy and wrote a long post about how he insulted me. I want to apologize. This is not who I am.

It bothered me that I became so upset about something as minor as this. I had to come back here and delete what I wrote. I am a nice guy. I shouldn't let silly things get to me.

Betep my brother, if you read this, no hard feelings. If you feel sorta grazed, I get it. You can ignore this and don't reply. But I wanna offer the proverbial "olive branch" and say lets put this behind us.

Heck, you may not care. But Im doing this for me. I am not this type of person. I never want to be this type of person.

If you read this and wanna send me a private message, Im open to it. If not, its ok brother.

I will give just one tidbit of advice. Try not to be so argumentative and cross with people. Your words can easily come across not nice. While what you said still annoys me alittle, its ok.

Thats all I wanna say. Lets carry on and move on.

 

[AndiM202]

done

we're gunna spend the next couple days streamlining the process so it requires less reboots, but it's totally doable. Guide/script next week maybe? It's amazing how much faster I work when I have a bunch of weirdos spamming me with messages that it's impossible

Wow, that's so nice dude, congratulations! I'll be very happy to see a guide - then I'm able to try myself on my other H710 Cheers!

 

[Sleyk]

Wow, that's so nice dude, congratulations! I'll be very happy to see a guide - then I'm able to try myself on my other H710 Cheers!

Yeah bro, I'm happy this is flashed too. I have a few H710's that could use a good "IT" conversion!

 

[Dave Corder]

Will the guide work with the H710P mini in addition to the H710? Just acquired an R720 with the card.

My understanding is that it's the same card just with more cache, but since I'm brand new to the Dell R720 world I'm not 100% sure (replacing a whitebox build whose MB died on me the other day).

 

[fohdeesha]

Will the guide work with the H710P mini in addition to the H710? Just acquired an R720 with the card.

My understanding is that it's the same card just with more cache, but since I'm brand new to the Dell R720 world I'm not 100% sure (replacing a whitebox build whose MB died on me the other day).

probably but i need a couple pieces of info off the card first to make sure, shoot me a pm

 

[Sleyk]

So @fohdeesha I read the whole github discussion, and wanna ask, can this be done over dos with megacli/megarec and sas2flsh only? I am severely lacking when it comes to Linux. As a matter of fact, I'm dead in the water. DOS, I can do.

I've done great things, but alas, I have not learned Linux as yet.

Is this as simple as writing the sbr you modified and cleanflash with megarec? I know you are working on the guide for this, but I fear if it is in Linux land, I will be more lost than a pin in a tornado blowing a haystack in a cornfield.

Can you upload the 2 modified sbr's you have? The one with 256bytes and the other with 512bytes? I wanna test this out on my R720 and some H710/H710P mini mono's I have lying around.

Again, thanks for the work you put in mate. You also gotta show us how you put the "hacktheplanet" in the board assembly output.

Let me know if you want me to shoot you a pm as well.

 

[fohdeesha]

the SBRs are in the zip attached to my github guide comment

definitely need linux, sas2flash or any of the dos utilities will fail to hostboot the card to flash the new firmware. We're probably going to try to distribute a ready to go linux ISO with the tools built in. But if you have 800 posts on a site like STH it may be time to start learning linux

sas2flash –o –assem “hacktheplanet”
sas2flash –o –tracer “42069”

 

[Sleyk]

You know, I honestly can't be mad with that statement, cuz I honestly should have learnt a long time ago! I set out to learn and stopped after getting involved in all sorts of other crazy hacky hardware stuff. But can you believe it, all without learning to use Linux.

Ok sounds good. Will go check that out. A linux ISO would be great as well. Heck, I would even gladly throw a few washington's your way for that. I know Linux is free to distribute, but if you made a ISO file with all the tools to get started, you got a customer out of me, and I'm sure many others who haven't adopted linux as yet!

Now to get reading and experimenting.

Lol. You kill me brother. "42069"