upgrading LSI SAS9211-8i fw IR->IT

[Eyal Lebedinsky <eyal@eyal.emu.id.au>]

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Following some excitement with my 4yo+ controller I acquires a new one.
I now want to upgrade the fw from IR to IT.

I did some reading, which suggests the process is simple and straight forward - if I am lucky.
The issue seems to be that the flashing program does not run on all mobos.

I think that my server (Intel BOXDH77KC) is not booting UEFI.
Anyway, I plan to do the upgrade elsewhere, probably on my workstation (Gigabyte GA-G33M-DS2R).
Both are rather old and will be upgraded within a year. I decided to give it a test.

I disconnected the (only) disk it has and installed the LSI controller.
[No problem here except that using the on-board VGA video (until now I used an add-on video card)
I see that the letters q-z do not show properly in FreeDOS, but are OK during POST]

I started reading here:
    https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/tutorial-updating-ibm-m1015-lsi-9211-8i-firmware-on-uefi-systems.11462/
where one needs to switch between UEFI and DOS mode. Probably unsuitable for me.

I then proceeded here
    http://brycv.com/blog/2012/flashing-it-firmware-to-lsi-sas9211-8i/
where the blog mentions some hurdles along the way.

I used files from two packages:
    LSI-9211-8i.zip
    9211-8i_Package_P20_IR_IT_FW_BIOS_for_MSDOS_Windows.zip

Booted OK from a FreeDOS 1.2 USB disk. Ran 'sas2flsh.exe -list' and got the attached screen.
Seems to me that this worked. At least I did not get the
      ERROR: Failed to initialize PAL. Exiting program.
message, in which case I would need to use the efi mode flasher.

Q1) Does this mean that I am clear to proceed?

Now I am ready to do a flash erase followed by a flash program.
However, LSI warns that a failure after the erase and before the program will leave a dead (unrecoverable) card.

Q2) How do I check that I can safely do BOTH steps?

TIA

-- 
Eyal Lebedinsky (eyal@eyal.emu.id.au)


-- 
Eyal Lebedinsky (eyal@eyal.emu.id.au)

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