Flash IBM M1015 to IT Mode

I use M1015 RAID card as many others run FreeNAS. It's a card with hardware RAID support but with ZFS you probably don't want to use it (google why). Here are the steps to flash it into IT mode so it just passthrough the disks to ZFS.

I was able to install my low-profile card to my Supermiciro board in a mini-tower enclosure and flashed the bios in just few minutes, and it was successful.

Of course based on a lot of great posts from this forum only  especially the reply from GeekGoneOld in this thread:https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...id-m1015-and-no-lsi-sas-adapters-found.27445/

Here comes the steps:

• prepare a DOS boot disk on thumb drive using rufus, then unpack "sas2008.zip" to it so it has "megarec" and empty SBR file "sbrempty.bin"

• prepare a UEFI thumb drive again using rufus, no need to be bootable, choose GPT table instead of MBR. then copy the 2118it.bin, sas2flash.efi, shellx64.efi on it (you can find in a lot of thread easily)

• remove power cable, then disconnec ted drives from board

• boot from DOS drive first, then

megarec -writesbr 0 sbrempty.bin
megarec -cleanflash 0

• Reboot

• boot into build-in EFI shell (F11 on supermicro board and to get boot menu)

• in EFI shell run below commands

shell> fs0:
shell> sas2flash.efi -o -f 2118it.bin
shell> sas2flash.efi -o -sasadd 500605bXXXXXXXXX (Greel label on the back of your M1015 card)
(some posts from google has -0 <zero> when writing address, it's should be -o <letter o> based on LSI document)

• then I shutdown, remove power cable, then hook up card and drives using the SFF-8087 1:4 split cable

• remove all thumb drives, then power back up to freeNAS again. it picks up all the zpool partition information automatically without any issue