Hi, thank you again for a great answer.
Everything you suggested worked just as you said and it did unpack and repack correctly i.e. i got the file.
Once rebooted the system went into a purple screen (of agony) with the following error:
The system has found a problem on yourt machine and cannot continue
Could not load multiboot modules: Boot image is corrupted
It may be that the driver is really not meant for my card (even though I'm still inclined to believe that there is a chance of me getting the HBAs to work),
or I screwed up something in the process. I did a recovery on the server and now it's back to square 1.
In the process I saw that the file was I was looking for (qla2xxx.map) was actually stored in the scsi_qla.v01 so i eventually unpacked and repacked that one.
None the less I have noticed that there is also a file named usr/share/hwdata/driver.pciids.d/qla4xxx.ids which I suspect to hold also a list of IDs that probably have to match the list in qla2xxx.map.
I'll give it a shot!
I'm marking your response as helpful.
Thanks again.