I had move all the stuff off of 4-6T drives, two were directly connected to the MOBO and two via the LSI card. I attempted to create a storage space and only one drive that was connected to the LSI card was accepted. I made several other attempts with no success and then pulled the plug.

Currently I have five hard drives connected to the MOBO and five drives connected to the LSI card. The drives are either 3TB, 4TB or 6TB. My "data" is on three drives 2-4TB and 1-6TB, one 6TB is used for my Acronis True Image backups and the other drives are used for copy 1 and copy 2 for my data backups. I had to play a lot of musical chairs to get the proper fit. Currently the final copies of the rebalance is running and I will verify everything tomorrow.  I have disconnected 8 USB drives I had attached to the desktop. The cable mess was a huge problem.

I've got some other pressing projects that require my time. Later this month or next I will try and install storage spaces on my laptop using 4or 5 3 TB drives (I'm waiting on a $5 eSATA to USB3 adapter). This then will be used for the 2nd copy of my backups.

Thanks to all that tried to help!!!!! Especially WarDog!!!

C:> or something similar

just use cd change directory like this

C>cd /bla /bla/ bla

to see a directory use ls

like this 

C>ls

file 1

file 2

file 3

(if it dont work type DIR ) sorry used to lunix

from memory so navigate to the directory in which your flash program is on 

so 

C>cd F:/folder1/

then your curser should change to 

F:/folder1>

at any time you can type help or help \all for a list of commands

but once you run the exe or bat it will take you to a normal ui(user interface style) and you just agree and flash 

if your unsure your in mdos type ver and it prints its version in a few lines 

the only thing you need to worry about if flashing is wrong drive

or a bad flash after you finally get the mdos program to run

lets say you agree and start the flash half way through, you lose power. dont fret as you can still reflash the device but the flash you just performed would be corrupt same as if it got stuck at 99% for an hour just try again.

while your in mdos your ok thou its 100% safe atm it sound like you cannot even locate the flasher program in mdos that you are going to use

usual a message like flash was successful would you like to reboot or exit hit y/n etc 

It is a real LSI SAS9211-8I 8 Port card. I got it last week just for this function, e.g. to act as a controller card. I don't recall where I got the info but originally I thought it was just a controller card. You can imagine the surprise when I discovered it was a RAID card. I wanted to stay away from a RAID card because I wanted to use different size drives.

The only way you can flash the IT bios is to do it at the EFI mode. I've never worked with UEFI thus it is totally confusing for me. I tried flashing by booting to DOS and that is when I discovered it had to be EFI.

I was referred to http://brycv.com/blog/2012/flashing-it-firmware-to-lsi-sas9211-8i/ and it helped until it got to the EFI section at which point I was in over my head.

YES I'm very skittish thus the need for the dummies instructions. As I understand I must first erase the existing BIOS and then flash it. The actual instructions are in the above link.  Also I've exchanged a LOT of emails with LSI support.