Flashing LSI 2308-based card to IT mode (LSI 9207–8i)

Earlier I returned a probable counterfeit of LSI 9205–8i card from HP. Paralel to that, I bought another card from the same seller, this time it’s listed as “2907 8I inspur”. I think maybe it’s a typo and should be 9207–8i. Took 2 days for it to arrive on my desk.

I turns out to be a typo. There is a label with teaxt 9207–8i, so it should be the right card. I plug the card on to my proxmox host (still on legacy boot).

Immediately it shows up unlike the other SAS2308 card I bought and returned. It shows up with SAS2308-IR, so it means the card is still in IR (RAID) mode. My SATA MX500 also detected by it, so this card is working great and I just need to flash it to IT mode.

I grabbed the latest P20 firmware and P14 sas2flash.efi from broadcom website, then I just boot to EFI shell and flash it using command sas2flash -o -e 7 to erase the IR firmware, then sas2flash -o -f 9207-8i.bin -b mptsas2.romto flash the newest P20 firmware and bios.

It works flawlessly. I rebooted to see if the card firmware has been updated and voila, it works!

The card now is in IT mode based on identifier.