Silicon Image SIL3112 Flashing: Easier Way Using flashrom

[cheesestraws]

Thanks to @dosdude1 and @Carlito and everyone else who has worked on this! My MP now has SATA using one of the Adaptec cards, which is very nifty, and was very easy to do.

 

[finkmac]

the adaptecs are pretty straightforward to mod and also look rather nice.

 

[Coloruser]

the adaptecs are pretty straightforward to mod and also look rather nice.

Indeed. Got one today, flashed it and just lifted VCC. Works seamlessly under OS X 10.4.11 and OS 9.2.2. however when i benchmarked an attached Samsung EVO 840 and a cheap Alibaba Sata SSD, the transfer speeds are limited to something like 70mb/sec. Changed from a yellow to a black Sata cable, but it stays the same. Am I missing something?

 

[obsolete]

What are the specs of your G4 @Coloruser ? There was a benchmark thread a while back, @GorfTheChosen saw about the same performance on a dual 450: https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?thr...-disk-speeds-ppc-68k.49268/page-3#post-554678

In the first post of that thread, @DarthNvader quoted 92MB/s on a MDD.

 

[Coloruser]

What are the specs of your G4 @Coloruser ? There was a benchmark thread a while back, @GorfTheChosen saw about the same performance on a dual 450: https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?thr...-disk-speeds-ppc-68k.49268/page-3#post-554678

In the first post of that thread, @DarthNvader quoted 92MB/s on a MDD.

It‘s a Sawtooth 450 Mhz. I can also testdrive the card in a G3 Minitower 266 and a 1.25 Ghz dual MDD. Is the PCI Bus driven by the Uni-North IC even without any other PCI card so limited on early G4s?

edit: did a retest in the G4 MDD - it is almost reaching 100mb/sec. Thus no real benefit for such machines as the UDM100 port is almost equally fast. Makes more sense for the slower G3 266 Minitower with its PIO mode 4 16mb/sec IDE bus or the TNT, Nitro or Tsunami based 1st generation PCI Macs with the 10mb/sec fast SCSI bus.

 

[cyrusbyte]

Was able to get the Adaptech ASH-1205SA to work just like the ASH 1210SA by Snipping Pin 8 (VCC) of the 24WC02 and was then able to flash it with the patched compressed rom. Boots from sata SSD on my beige G3 and 7600. I noticed that some sata SSD hard drives are very flaky especially larger ones and the High Speed SSD drives. I purchased some 16gb and 32gb Apacer tiny SSDs and they seem to work just fine. I experimented with the IDE to sata adapters and seem to have similar results. You can see in my picture which pin i clipped to make the Adaptech work. Just remember the boot partition size should be 7gb or less or you will eventually have issues. View attachment IMG20250525220412.jpg
View attachment IMG20250525220459.jpg

 

[Coloruser]

I´ve now installed the card in beige G3 Tower / 300. But here, I am running into a problem.

• Mac OS 9.2.2 boots from the internal spinning HD and I can access the SSD. FWB HDT shows almost 50mb/sec maximum transfer. A huge improvement over the onboard 16mb/sec IDE channel.
• Mac OS X 10.2.8 refuses to boot at all with a device attached to the Adapter card and creates a kernel panic. No matter whether this is a SSD or a 2.5" SATA notebook drive.

The G3 MT 300 is fitted with a Asante 10/100 Network and a NEC based USB Card. No issues due to the cards on Mac OS 9.2.2 with SSD connected and on Mac OS X 10.2.8 without any drive connected to the Adapter card. Tested without the cards - same kernel panic.

Any idea about this behaviour?

 

[cgp]

Any idea about this behaviour?

Try forcing a safe boot (by holding the shift key on boot) to rebuild the kext cache. This will ensure the correct driver is pulled from the card’s ROM and cached.

 

[treellama]

These cards/drivers don't work with 10.2 as far as I'm aware.

 

[cgp]

These cards/drivers don't work with 10.2 as far as I'm aware.

You're correct. Panther (10.3) or Tiger (10.4) are required. And with XPF you can install either on any Beige G3. I have both DT and MT. The DT has a reflashed SIL3112 and SATA SSD.

 

[Coloruser]

Tried my luck with 10.3 today. Installed a fresh 9.2.2 on the original 7gig HD, used XPostFacto 4 to start the installation from the Panther CD 1. All works well until the installer reboots (prior to continuing with CD 2). Then, the OS 9 and X systems are corrupted. A happy face appears and the HD starts reading for a few seconds, then stops. Forcing a booth with the OS 9 install CD and running XPostFacto shows an error log:

XPostFacto Version 4.0
Compatible: AAPL,Power Mac 63
Finding Firevire devices
SCST Bus OpenFirmwareName: scsi
Bus Number: 1
Finding SCSI devices
Creating new ATA Bus OpenFirmareName: ide
ShortOpenFirmwareName: ide
Creating new ATA Bus
OpenFirmwareName: ide 1
ShortOpenFirmwareName: ide 1
Creating ATADevice
OpenFirmwareName: ide /@0
ShortOpenFirmwareName : ide /e0
Cheating ATADevice
OpenFimwareName: ide1 / 00
ShortOpenFirmwarNlame : idet /00
MountedVolume: MountedVolume error : - 8138 of a program error
MountedVolume: MountedVolume error: - 8738 of a program error

Any ideas?

 

[cgp]

What was your partition layout when you started the OSX install? This failure would be consistent with attempting to installl OSX via XPF on a partition on the IDE drive that's beyond the first 8GB. There's an annoying hardware limitation here.

I've successfully installed OSX to IDE within 8GB mark and also to a SATA SSD on a SIL3112 card.

 

[Coloruser]

the spinning HD was only a 8gb drive - so that should have not be the problem. I have tried again with another drive and a 7gb Partition for OS X 9 and 10.3. same issue……

 

[error1]

So I’m having an odd issue with my flashed Adaptec 1210SA in my Beige G3 with Rev. C ROM running Mac OS 9.2.2. After a cold start, I will always get the alert that the machine was improperly shut down and it runs through a disk check. It seems that when I initiate the Shut Down command, the hard drive is not correctly dismounted. The same does not occur if I choose Restart.

I have tried a couple of different hard drives (one Seagate, one WD) and the same behaviour occurs.

Has anyone seen this issue before?

Did you find a clean solution to this? I have the same issue on my 9600 running 8.6 after upgrading to SATA and I worry about something eventually getting corrupted if I keep ignoring it forever.