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Before this question is marked as a duplicate of 'Just installed LSI 9211; no drives showing up to Linux' or anything similar: No. My problem was with the UEFI firmware being unable to boot from the LSI card. Linux sees the drives completely fine, and I just mention it because my bootloader is GRUB2. Switching the PCI port to which the card was connected didn't help.

I recently acquired a LSI SAS PCIe card, specifically a 9211-8i, because I needed to connect several hard disks to my computer. I have a somewhat complicated storage layout, and ended up needing to install Linux on a disk connected to the LSI card. Well, my computer is configured to boot in UEFI mode, and while the operating system can see all the drives with no problem, the firmware can't. I'm able to install the GRUB2 bootloader into my primary M.2 SSD, and GRUB launches... but it is unable to see the disks connected to the LSI card.

Is there any module or way to allow GRUB2 to see those disks?

TheXDS
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Apparently the card has two pieces of firmware in it: one for the card itself, and another for the system it's installed in. The second one is normally a BIOS extension, but you'd need it to be an UEFI-compatible driver instead.

It might be possible to flash the UEFI driver to the card in place of the BIOS extension, or just load it as a separate UEFI driver file from your primary M.2 SSD.

Since LSI was bought by Broadcom, and then Broadcom by Avago, support for old LSI controllers can now be kind of uncertain. But after a bit of searches on Broadcom support pages, I found some promising-looking packages:

This might be the package you need.

If you want to flash the driver onto the card permanently, you'll also need the flash tool.

Apparently the FreeNAS users and other hobbyists prefer to switch the other firmware on the card from the IR version (hardware RAID) to IT version (straightforward disk controller useful for software RAID).

Here's one link describing the procedure. (Sorry it's in Finnish, but it has good screenshots that might be helpful anyway.)

According to some reports, you may need to downgrade that firmware to the P7 level first to do that. So, two more packages:

This question might have more useful links.

telcoM
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  • I'll add on to this: my Dell T320 absolutely refused to show my LSI controller or the drive attached to it in any UEFI boot menu list *until* I actually installed debian, so it may want to not only see a device, but see an actual EFI program to run, before it will appear! – qid Apr 19 '20 at 01:10
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You can set a delay for boot in GRUB loader to give more time for RAID controller to initialize the disks.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/55865/grub-cant-find-raid-partition-in-fresh-install-of-11-04

P.Pauls
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