When attempting to flash my LSI SAS 9211-8i card on my ASUS H87I-PLUS LGA 1150 Intel H87 Mini ITX Motherboard, I was able to get through all of the instructions until I was finally ready to flash, using SAS2FLSH.exe. The error reported was:
ERROR: Failed to initialize PAL. Exiting program.
What would cause this?
Hit my head against the wall (a lot) on this. For me, solved it by:
Follow the rest of the instructions on this page (http://digitalcardboard.com/blog/2014/07/09/flashing-it-firmware-to-the-lsi-sas-9211-8i-hba-2014-efi-recipe/)
; to show the controller and verify the current version.
sas2flash.efi -listall
; to erase the BIOS, do not reboot after this command.
sas2flash.efi -o -e 6
; to write the new firmware and BIOS.
sas2flash.efi -o -f 2118it.bin -b mptsas2.rom
More instructions here to compare: http://brycv.com/blog/2012/flashing-it-firmware-to-lsi-sas9211-8i/
Update and to know the reason:
Reason:
i cite from http://brycv.com/blog/2012/flashing-it-firmware-to-lsi-sas9211-8i/ : "I booted from the SD card and attempted to run sas2flsh but was met with an error: “ERROR: Failed to initialize PAL. Exiting program.” Fortunately, article 16266 mentions the error at the end and directs you to article 15807. The gist of article 15807 is that Intel 3000 or 5000-based boards have optionROM limitations which cause the above error. The easiest solution is to use a different system. Alternately, you can use the UEFI installer."
Update:
The sas2flash.efi ist now available from Broadcom The files on the LSI web page is no longer available. E.g. search for the file installer_p12_for_uefi.zip or using the Link.
Current Version: installer_p20_for_uefi.zip
Thanks to aronchick for the hint to sas2flash.efi !!
Based off of aaronchik's answer and bernstein's comment, this appears to be down to version mismatches between binaries.
Though there's quite a lot of thorough guide's out there, it tends to be that the actually binaries and tools are distributed all over the place, and often assume your motherboard or bootloader give you access to a bundled EFI shell, etc.
Getting compatible binaries took me quite a few hours of work last night, so I've bundled up a project that combines a walkthrough as well as all of the resources needed to complete the whole process:
I ran into the exact same problem with updating the LSI SAS 9211-8i ("Failed to initialize PAL"), and found an unlikely solution: A firmware update was possible from within the MegaRAID Storage Manager running under Windows, there's a link "Update firmware" right on its dashboard.
After hours struggling with this error I was finally able to do it booting off a Windows 10 USB and went into Repair / Advanced / Commandline and was able to run the dos commands to update the card.
