We have a few of these servers - Dell R700 and similar that still have the Perc 6i (in other words LSI Megaraid) controllers on board. We have been trying to flash the ROM of these to get to the latest firmware that Dell have recommended as it may solve some issues we see with SSD Sata drives. We do not use any old drives but Samsung 850 SSDs to be sure of longevity etc.
The issue is that these drives fall off of the controller even though there is nothing wrong with them but any SAS or SATA drives that are not SSDs work fine all day long.
The latest firmware 6.3.3 threatens to fix this issue and so we are obviously keen to install.
There are two options to install:
The first is using the Avago MegaRaid utility which is the latest incarnation of the LSI MegaRaid software which controls the Perc 6i very nicely and when we ask the software to update the controller with the FW1371il.rom file it prepares to upgrade from ROM version 1.22.32-1371 (which seems odd given the filename) to version 1.22.52-1909
We tick the confirm box and say yes and the application says it is downloading the firmware and then installing the firmware but then a message from MegaRaid Storage Manager says 'The image file is invalid and could not be flashed to the controller.'
This is consistent with every PERC 6i adaptor we try to flash.
We can also download the PERC 6i Windows Update Utility which begins collecting the inventory of the system etc. and then decides that 'This update package is not compatible with your system configuration' which doesn't help either.
The original reason for the upgrade - the Samsung 850 drives falling off of the system - actually seems to have been solved by upgrading the MegaRaid software which was apparently communicating via Windows to the PERC 6i controller and marking the drives as offline.