The firmware and boot rom files, and sometimes the flashers, are often wrapped up in zip or exe files which need to be unpacked and the relevant files extracted. Without that, it won't ask if you want to change vendor ID, even if you're using the right versions. Enter your motherboard BIOS/setup panel and disable orom on boot for storage cards or for that specific card, if enabled (so the card's misflashed state can't interfere with proper booting). LSI controllers are often reused for other components, including as "hidden controllers" internal to some SSDs, and are also built in to some motherboards. There is a useful and comprehensive list of HBA and RAID cards and their specs, from old to newest, here, sorted by the chip they use (2008, 3008 etc).

The LSI 9211-i8 HBA controller has two ports - one to the Intel expander and the other port is currently free. The files include a v1 EFI shell (compatible with all EFI boards; v2 EFI shells might not work on v1 boards) - note there are 2 copies of it because different boards expect it in different places (in the root dir or in \efi\boot). This guide will work whether you have one or multiple 9211-style cards installed, but it's not unreasonable to do them one at a time. This Hba Offers Dynamic Sas Functionality Including Dual-port Drive Redundancy And Sata Compatibility.If that's your situation, you will need to find and download the firmware, and also perhaps find a tool to unpack it, so you can get the actual IT firmware file. The main exception where much more care is needed, is if you have any drives which are set up as a hardware/firmware RAID array or using any kind of hardware/firmware data caching or speedup system. I cover the difference between them below, but for the moment what matters is that if you're using the card with ZFS, as FreeNAS does, you will almost certainly need to have the manufacturer's IT version firmware (for HBAs) not the IR version (for RAID) during the crossflash process. If not, use the above command first of all, to get the info, if you insist on making a note beforehand But if it's a "clean start" situation with no need to preserve existing SAS topology or attached disk info, mostly you just want to be sure the SAS ID is unique in that box and you won't need to have an existing SAS ID to crossflash+prepare your card.

To do the other cards, open the script in Notepad or a text editor, it's got maybe 4 lines that start "!Expander work in hardware level, no driver need, so if your controller work with the OS then it also work. That being said, since the card is flashed to IT mode acting as an HBA instead of a raid card, they may just be served up to your computer transparently as just sata connected drives. org/freenas/Convert-LSI-HBA-card-to-IT-mode/ that was mentioned in a older post here I ran into a issue when creating the bootable USB. exe) will NOT work on a board that's detected as EFI, and sas2flash EFI will NOT work on a board lacking EFI.