The system was noticably noisier on boot compared to what it was before I installed these new drives, which leads me to believe that the card is, at the very least, supplying power and spinning up the drives. I looked more closely around the area of that port but could find no evidence of physical damage to the card. One of the two 8077 ports (in the unlikely case it makes a difference, the one farther from the PCIe slot) was slightly finicky, but the cable clicked into and locked in place without arguments once I slided it in at the right angle. To the 9211's internal ports I hooked up two 8077-to-4x8482 breakout cables, connecting each to two HDDs (leaving unused the other two plugs on each) with no PMP or anything similar in between. Since the card is obviously being detected at some level, I do not believe anything like the graphics-card-only x16 slots is at play here. The motherboard has two PCIe x16 slots, one of which is listed as "x4 performance".
Drives all listed as lsi megasr full#
The card being PCIe x8 didn't need the full length of the PCIe x16 slot I had available, but as far as I can tell that should not be a problem if the host and card are speaking to each other at all. Physically installing the card posed no problems. This, along with the fact that the kernel is speaking to the card (see below) leads me to believe that the card itself is slightly more useful than a dud. The card came straight out of the packaging and into the host after visual inspection that didn't uncover anything that was clearly wrong with the card (though I have no known good card to compare against).
![drives all listed as lsi megasr drives all listed as lsi megasr](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/YoYAAOSwzfNc~Ehe/s-l400.jpg)
All software is up to date and the kernel is 3.2.65-1+deb7u2 x86_64 according to uname.
![drives all listed as lsi megasr drives all listed as lsi megasr](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/fyYAAOSwD9JeQWNY/s-l400.jpg)
I just added a LSI 9211-8i to a system running Debian Wheezy (on the Linux kernel).