Question [SOLVED] Dell PERC H310 Flashing Process - STUCK! No LSI SAS Adapters Found!

[Brother_Hood]

I got myself the famous Dell PERC H310 RAID card at a very good price. I don't need any RAID functionality, as I just need it to extend the SATA ports in my simple NAS. I read everywhere that it is recommended to flash it in IT mode to maximize connectivity and performance. Would that be advisable in my simple use case?

So far the card works fine, it detected all drives even in the Windows Pre-Installation Environment. Only thing I noticed so far is that the drives don't spin down after the set amount of minutes in Power Options. Would that be solvable with IT mode?

 

[Brother_Hood]

HELP PLEASE!!!

Since the drives wouldn't spin down, and I read it would be possible with IT firmware, I went ahead and tried it with this guide:

Updated: SAS HBA crossflashing or flashing to IT mode, Dell Perc H200 and H310

Default firmware for this guide is: 2118it.bin Version 20.00.07.00 Release date: 11-FEB-16 WARNING: If you have an Integrated, Mini or Mini Mono Perc H310 do NOT try to crossflash with these steps.…

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It all went well until the first reboot, now I'm stuck as it tells me there were "No LSI SAS Adapters Found"! Tried it with both DOS and UEFI! I've been researching for an hour now, getting desperate! Please help! Since I cleared the firmware correctly with confirmation message, I don't believe I did anything to brick it!

UPDATE: Sorry, I'm so nervous right now, I put in the wrong link to a similar guide. Now fixed.

UPDATE 2: Card shows up in DOS when I issue 'megarec -adplist', as shown in the attached picture. So I guess I can calm down a bit now. But please, how in the world can I get it flashed now? At this point I'd be happy to just get it back to its previous state with the Dell firmware. Only reason I was going to flash it was because I couldn't spin the drives down in Windows Server.

FINAL UPDATE:
Firmly believing that I did nothing wrong, the suspicion grew on me that UEFI was the culprit. So I pulled out an HP z400 Workstation from the Win7 era, and put the card in there. sas2flash still wouldn't recognize it as an LSI adapter, but I was able to revert back to the original Dell firmware using this lifesaving guide:

Updated: SAS HBA crossflashing or flashing to IT mode, Dell Perc H200 and H310

Default firmware for this guide is: 2118it.bin Version 20.00.07.00 Release date: 11-FEB-16 WARNING: If you have an Integrated, Mini or Mini Mono Perc H310 do NOT try to crossflash with these steps.…

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After a great sigh of relief, I wasn't ready to pack it in just yet. I transferred the card over to an even older system, an HP xw8200 Workstation from the XP era. And finally, lo and behold, I now have an LSI SAS2008 HBA card running the latest IT firmware, simply following the steps in the guide. Here are the commands that worked for me in the end from a FreeDOS environment:

megacli.exe -AdpAllInfo -aAll -page 20
megacli.exe -AdpAllInfo -aAll | find “SAS Address”
megacli.exe -AdpAllInfo -aAll | find “SAS Address” > SASADD.txt

megarec -writesbr 0 sbrempty.bin
megarec -cleanflash 0

reboot

sas2flsh.exe -o -f 6GBPSAS.FW
sas2flsh.exe -o -sasadd 5xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

reboot

sas2flsh.exe -o -f 2118p7.bin

reboot

s2fp19.exe -o -f 2118it.bin

So the moral of the story is, don't try flashing those old storage adapter cards on modern UEFI motherboards.