This guide will outline the steps to flash a PERC H200 with LSI-9211-8i firmware to IT mode to allow direct disk access on an R710. This is helpful for situations where direct disk access is preferred over a RAID configuration, for instance, for use with a FreeNAS installation.

There’s a guide techmattr put together here that covers most of these steps, but I found it was missing a couple of details. These steps should ensure that your drives remain available for use as a BIOS boot device.

The steps to complete are:

Prepare boot media:

  1. Get yourself a USB flash drive, just about any size will do.
  2. Download Rufus to prepare the drive for use as FreeDOS boot media.
  3. Open Rufus, select your flash drive, choose FreeDOS as your boot selection, and click START

Download firmware:

  1. Techmattr has complied most of the files you will need, (and more) at the link here. Simply extract this zip to the root of your flash drive.
  2. Additionally, to preserve the functionality to boot from your drives, you’ll need the LSI-9211-8i BIOS rom, available here. Under the sasbios_rel directory, you’ll find mptsas2.rom. Copy this file to the root of your flash drive.

Flash the firmware:

Insert your flash drive in your R710, and boot from it. At the DOS prompt, run the following commands:

  1. sas2flsh.exe -c 0 -list Make a note of the SAS Address listed.
  2. megarec.exe -writesbr 0 sbrempty.bin
  3. megarec.exe -cleanflash 0 When this is complete, reboot your system!
  4. sas2flsh.exe -o -f 6GBPSAS.fw When compete, reboot again.
  5. sas2flsh.exe -o -f 2118it.bin -b mptsas2.rom
  6. s2fp19.exe -o -sasadd YOUR_SAS_ADDRESS replace YOUR_SAS_ADDRESS with the actual SAS Address value you wrote down previously. Omit any dashes.

Remove the flash drive, reboot, and you’re done!