It sucked away 3 days of my life, but i FINALLY flashed my LSI cards to IT Mode and v20 firmware. Feel free to contact me if you are a fellow noob wanting help.
Holy COW was that painful. It made me doubt my entire existence. Dramatic, i know, but… WOW.
the BIG BIG hangup for me was finding a EFI Shell v1 that my Supermicro X12SAE-5 would boot. Once i finally got EFI Shell v1 loaded, everything else came into place (sas2flash from broadcom does not support v2 shell)
Several guides i found had correct procedures. I am ashamed to admit it, but ChatGPT actually found me the link to the working v1 shell download and walked me through the rest of the steps, so i am not going to bother bosting links to guides since the commands listed by chatgpt were accurate and matched the dozen or so guides I have read the last week., i will suggest the same and just post the link to the shell that worked for me:
9211-4i has a SAS2008. The LSI Pre-boot USB/CD should do it.
In my archive I see some tools right now. Here is a small excerpt from Broadcom:
Finally, if you don’t see this screen, or it flashes by too quickly, a third option is to use the sas2flash utility to display the info about your card. Download the utility for Legacy BIOS Installer_P20_for_MSDOS_and_Windows or UEFI Installer_P20_for_UEFI motherboards and put it on a bootable USB thumb drive. Boot your computer to the thumb drive and run sas2flsh -listall for Legacy systems, or sas2flash.efi -listall for UEFI systems. The utility will display information about the controller, including its chipset under the Ctlr column.
How to flash add-in LSI SAS2008 controllers (9201, 9210, 9211, etc.) to P20 IT mode
