I recently had the need to update the firmware on an HP  LSI22320-HP U320 SCSI card. The HP firmware was resulting in Domain Validation (a SCSI technique to determine appropriate/supported SCSI speed for each SCSI device) errors. I wanted a more up to date version. I turned to the Broadcom LSI22320SE driver site and found an updated firmware download, in a file named Fusion-MPT_IT_FW10334_BIOS_50703pt_FLASH_10304.zip.

I created a USB boot disk with FreeDOS using Rufus (a great tool I only just found). I copied the relevant files (dos4gw.exe, flsh1030.exe, mptps.rom and it_1030.fw) to the USB stick. I booted up and tried to update. I managed to apply the firmware (it_1030.fw) but not the BIOS (mptps.rom). The error displayed was:

 Error: Attempting to download a generic BIOS image to
 a adapter meant for a customer specific BIOS image!

As this is an HP card I was a little disappointed but not surprised. Looking at the help output from “flsh1030.exe -?” I saw no obvious way to override this. Many Google searches later I came across a post on a Russian forum in Google’s cache that gave the hint I needed – the undocumented “-g” flag. Rerunning the following command overwrote the firmware on the card.

flsh1030 -a -g -b mptps.rom

The new flash gave a new set of menus. More importantly the domain validation errors preventing the drives from working were gone.