Cross Flashing a Dell PERC H200 BIOS to Support Larger SATA Disks

The latest firmware for the Dell PERC H200 still doesn’t support SATA disks of greater than 2.2TB. In fact the card cannot even detect SATA drives that are larger than this.  As the PERC H200 is essentially a rebadged LSI 9211-8i card however, the firmware and BIOS from that card can be flashed onto the PERC H200 to provide support for larger SATA hard drives.

The procedure is as follows:

1. Download the latest 9211-8i firmware package from LSI. I got my copy from http://www.lsi.com/products/storagecomponents/Pages/LSISAS9211-8i.aspx (click on the ‘Support & Downloads’ tab, then expand the firmware section). I downloaded the ‘9211_8i_Package_P16_IR_IT_Firmware_BIOS_for_MSDOS_Windows’ package and extracted the contents.
2. Copy the required files from the extracted archive onto bootable media. I created a Windows 98SE boot USB stick and copied the files onto it. The required files are: 
   sas2flsh.exe – this is the  flash application. Copy the version from the sas2flash_dos_rel folder if using a dos boot disk.
   2118ir.bin – this is the firmware for the 9211-8i.
   mptsas2.rom – this is the card’s BIOS.
3. Boot the server containing the PERC H200 from the bootable media. I’d recommend disconnecting any drives from the RAID card before flashing the firmware and BIOS.
4. Once booted, change to the folder containing the files copied to the media, above, and issue the following commands
   sas2flsh –o –f 2118ir.bin
   sas2flsh –o –b mptsas2.rom
   sas2flsh –o –reset
   Each command should report success before you move onto the next one. If any indicate a failure, double check that you copied the correct files onto the bootable media.
5. Reboot the server and test the card.

The above procedure allowed the H200 I was using to  detect and use two 3TB disks.