This is not meant as a guide either but rather than having to search and search for the info, this might be of help
The main reason for writing this is because there was a step missing in the guides, which is how to get into EFI when the motherboard don't have an EFI Shell.
This in turn was used because of an error when trying to flash the HBA from DOS.
Disclaimer: You flash your HBA on your own risk
Anyway here goes:
1.
Following this guide.
http://www.servethehome.com/ibm-serveraid-m1015-part-4/
The .zip archive that you download includes all the firmware etc.
I used a bootable USB memory for these files.
For me everything worked until the step where you flash the new firmware (2118it.bin in my case).
At that point the sas2flsh utility reported an error: "Error: Failed to initialize PAL. Exiting program"
2.
After some Google excercises I found the following guide:
http://brycv.com/blog/2012/flashing-it- ... as9211-8i/
Basicly the guide states that some Intel boards have optionROM limitations which cause the error message.
A solution to the problem is to flash the HBA through UEFI Shell.
But it seems that some boards don't have all UEFI features.
You can enable UEFI Boot but it seems to be just a limited set of functions on my mobo.
From searching around it seems that it's just there to provide support for booting on 2TB+ drives.
The guide/article states that on his motherboard he could enter the UEFI Shell from the mobo boot menu, there was no such option on my motherboard.
3.
Getting into the EFI Shell.
After some more Google-work I found this page:
http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/getting.html
On the reFind page I downloaded the:
"A USB flash drive image file"
And used the win32diskimager program to write the .img to another USB memory (I use Windows7).
After that I inserted both USB-sticks into the NAS-box and after selecting the USB-stick with the refind bootloader, I could from there enter the EFI Shell.
4.
Flashing the HBA.
After getting into the EFI Shell you can again consult the guide in Step2.
After getting into the shell you should see a list of devices available.
In my case the second USB-stick (from Step1) was designated as fs1.
So basically I just wrote
Code: Select all
fs1If you do "dir" or "ls" afterwards you should see the files from step1 and you should have the sas2flash.efi program in that directory (included in the .zip in step1).
In my case the next lines were:
Code: Select all
sas2flash.efi -o -f 2118it.binCode: Select all
sas2flash.efi -o -sasadd 500605bxxxxxxxxxI didn't care about the optionROM so I skipped that in the first sas2flash line (see guide in step1).
The second is the SAS-address of the HBA, since it seems that guide1 wipes the firmware/settings first.
As per the guide in step1, replace the xxxxxxxxx with your specific address.
That was it but it took quite a while to sort it out and finding the information.
Final note:
You may not have these issues depending on the mobo, if it have a limited set of optionROM / UEFI-features or not
So I hope this helps someone later on....good luck.