I recently picked up a few Fujitsu D2607 RAID Controllers (cheap off eBay!) to replace the Rocket RAID controller in my NAS, which I have come to distrust as it has at times been a little flaky (plus, they have never provided a single firmware update, and support if asking anything is non-existent). The Fujitsus use the popular and well-thought-of LSI Controller chips.

As I really like ZFS on Linux I really had no need for the RAID functionality on the cards, and in fact found the RAID BIOS (and the need to configure each drive as a separate Virtual Drive in order to be presented to Linux) to be a real PITA. My testing showed that replacing a drive in the inevitable event of a drive failure would almost certainly result in loss of the whole array. Not really what I was looking for.

So I did a bit of research, and found that the usual approach for these (and other LSI based cards) is to flash a different BIOS onto them with the intention of turning the cards into a simple (non-RAID) controller.

A bunch more research, downloaded some files, and fairly quickly rendered my first D2607 inoperable! This is looking good so far! So, whole lot more searching, some experimentation, and some conclusions reached. There is a LOT of information out there about LSI cards, and how to flash them, and most of it is just plain WRONG, which became quite apparent when I finally found a method that worked.

Many thanks to "Jonny" who posted in This Forum Thread with a solid set of instructions on how to do it. You can go over there, or read further on here, where I'll tell you exactly what worked for me. Once I'd recovered my first failed attempt, my second and third cards were flashed within 10 minutes or so, no errors. And they work beautifully, just as I had hoped!

What You'll Need

• A Fujitsu D2607 RAID Controller Card
• You can download the files you'll need from HERE or from HERE
• A blank USB Thumbdrive
• Software to make the Thumbdrive bootable - Download it from Here (Rufus)
• A Motherboard which supports both Legacy and UEFI booting
• A bit of confidence working from a command line (gui fanboyz can give up about here!)

Preparation

• Follow the instructions on the Rufus Download Page to format your USB Thumbdrive and make it bootable.
• Test that the ThumbDrive boots OK on your PC.  As your PC is booting, look for an option similar to "Boot Options". The actual key to invoke Boot Options varies from otherboard to Motherboard, but is often the F12 function key.  Choose that option, and you should see a choice to boot into your Thumbdrive (USB). That should take you to a very quaint DOS prompt (usually C:).  Type dir and press ENTER, you will see a list of files. Cool!  Now CTRL-ALT-DELETE to restart your PC and Don't boot from the Thumbdrive.
• Unzip the contents from the files you downloaded just now, and copy them onto the Thumbdrive.
• Test again that it boots, and that you can see the contents of the drive (dir /p)
• Now boot the Thumbdrive again. Going to into Boot Options should now give you a choice of booting into UEFI Mode. Do that!
• You should end up at a text prompt again.  Type "mount fs0:" (without the quotes) and press ENTER.  Now type "fs0:" and press ENTER.  Type "dir" and press Enter and you should see all your copied files again.
• Shut your PC down, and insert your RAID controller.
• You're ready to start!

Getting it down and dirty!

• Boot your PC onto the Thumbdrive (DOS Mode), you should see the RAID BIOS prompts. Ignore or accept any errors about missing drives etc.
• Type:
  megacli -adpallinfo -aall |find /i "sas address" > sas_addr.txt
  and press ENTER
• Type:
  megarec -readsbr 0 sbrbackup.bin
  and press ENTER
• Type:
  megarec -writesbr 0 SBR-A21.bin
  and press ENTER
• Type:
  megarec -cleanflash 0
  and press ENTER

If any command fails, reboot and start that step again.

Your RAID card is now blank.

• Reboot your PC onto the Thumbdrive, and go into UEFI mode.
• Type the following lines, pressing ENTER after each:
  mount fs0
  fs0:
  sas2hax -o -f 2118it.bin
• It will error about it can't reset the adapter, as long as it did the firmware download, it's all good.
• Reboot and then boot the UEFI on the usb again
• Type the following lines, pressing ENTER after each:
  mount fs0
  fs0:
  sas2hax -o -f 2118it.bin -b mptsas2.rom
  sas2hax  -o -sasadd (sas address is in sas_addr.txt,  if its blank, just make a random 16 digits up.)

Yeehah!  Your card is now flashed.  If your card is a 4i, you can probably stop here.  If it's an 8i (2 SAS ports) then at this stage probably only the top port works, and you'll only be able to access 4 Hard Drives.

• Shut down your PC, and add at least one Hard Drive to each SAS Port on the Controller.
• Start your PC again, and when the prompt comes up press CTRL-C to get into the Controller Configuration tool.
• Check that both drives are available to the controller, and if not, keep going with the steps below.
• Boot onto your Thumbdrive (DOS mode).
• Reflash the SBR for your card by typing :
  megarec -writesbr 0 SBR-A11.bin

Check the drives are available, you should be all good to go!