unplug the card was already done. The only way I could access the MB bios as I was going to attempt to do a factory reset which, unfortunately is not an option on this board. I’m probably going to wind up having to flash the bios if my original settings can’t be reset.
It sounds like some setting in the motherboard has changed. Perhaps an option that was not there before? Like the difference between ahci and raid mode or something?
I believe you are very correct. Here is what I’ve found. Yes, the setting from in the motherboard bios changed from CSM? to RAID somehow. It was a pain figuring out how to stop booting with the HBA and had to revert to an S.O.S boot device. Yes, the reasoning for the power failure on the SAS drives, amounted to having the wrong cable and the 8i cable was needed. Spending all the money is the way I like to learn these things; but at least now I have a little understanding of the differences. You were correct about the software and the credential were actually my own Windows logon credential. Nowhere within the program is that mentioned and the “help” button opens a new window and takes one back to the webpage, which also is of no help in most cases. So, now the drives have power; but initializing them is painfully slow…DAYS. As of right now, I haven’t been able to accomplish that task in Windows. It seems I have to unlock the software for more options 
and still hope. This will be a very long process restoring my system. I hope it’s all worth it. Once again though, thanks for your assistance in the matter.
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Thanks for getting back to us with your results!
Glad you are persevering anyway, despite strain, stress, and frustration.
I apologise that I have only used very old cards, and only really in HBA mode
I am not gonna lie, I was concerned in case I had inadvertently advised some setting that made the system become irrecoverable…
I’d like to call out to a forumite who may have tips, @aBav.Normie-Pleb who has done some great work with some backplanes, in case he might have any tips on a raid controller directly attaching to drives.
iirc, there is another guy, perhaps Twin Savage, who also seems well versed in hardware controllers, but I am not sure of his user handle.
@twin_savage hey bud, were you the fella well versed in hardware raid controllers?
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I’d consider myself maybe moderately versed.
Microchip’s (Adaptec) maxView Storage Manager also has this same behavior where it’ll pick up the local account’s credentials for the storage management account… and I don’t see this mentioned very often in Adaptec documentation either.
With these newer raid card, you should be able to administrate it in the BIOS of the computer itself too, theres a UEFI hook that exposes pretty much all the operations the raid cards can do within the UEFI BIOS of the motherboard itself (as opposed to the old raid card’s dedicated BIOS you use to be able to boot into).
I wouldn’t expect a full initialization to take this long, perhaps only a day normally. Do you have the option to do a fast initialization, or even a background initialization?
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Haha. Thanks for responding. I’m in the process of trying to recover data from yet another drive which (as I’m sure you already know) is also painfully slow with faulty (still moderately recoverable) drives.
At the same time, one of the SAS’s is - I just noticed - in the process of doing a format in the Windows version of the SAS controller’s software. I expect my current partition of the faulty drive and the SAS operation will finish close to around the same time. As Windows is also nagging me for updates , I’ll look into it after reboot/reset and let you know. Once I changed the cables however, I did notice there seemed to be more options available in bios. I’ll let you know though. Thanks again.
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Intermediate note: Fast initialization is possible. Whoever wrote the programming for Broadcom didn’t really think it through though. The software is incredibly confusing and inaccurate notification is given at times.
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I found that my card’s BIOS administration actually had better descriptions of some of the operations than the full fledged windows administration utility which is crazy:
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The pizz poor software for the controller does in fact have a fast initialize option…it’s a small check box and easily missed - I did. 
I don’t know if it’s normal but there is no pass thru from controller to windows where raid drives are concerned. I’ve discovered the only option is to create virtual drives which represent the physical disks attached to the HBA. How the data is distributed or IF the data is actually distributed on the physical disks is anybody’s guess. I’m not taking that chance so I’ll maintain additional disks in the future.
I tried to attach one of my SATA to the HBA. There is no boot possible. I’m sure that thought process is that the raid is only supposed to serve as data storage/backup anyway so it doesn’t need to boot. My concern is the worst case scenario of disk failure. Of course that technically should happen with raid, right? Right?
Now my question is, is there any 3rd party software support for Raid controllers? The Broadcom software is less than optimal.
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May be redundant but let’s try to get on the same page:
(I only have a HBA 9500 without any RAID features but the following steps should be the same)
- Go to the 9560-8i’s download page:
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Download the Windows drivers, Firmware 7.30 and LSA 7.30
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Decompress the drivers, decompress the driver ZIP file within the initial downloaded ZIP file, install the drivers
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Install LSA in standalone mode for local server management, that will enable a web interface you can access via a shortcut on the desktop. The current user must have a local account and a password, it won’t work without that.
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Log into LSA and upgrade the firmware using this GUI web interface.
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Shut down the system, wait 10 sec and power it on again
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Log in again into LSA and check if drives show up there.