I have some questions and thoughts about this.
Contrary to most of what I have read about them, I have been successful in booting from both SE II and SE IV cards in my Quadras (700 and 800). In both cases there was no magic involved, just followed the instructions in the SEIV user manual and it Just Worked. I have the II in the 700 and the IV in the 800.
I don't know what firmware is on the SE II card, but the SE IV was previously bootable with 1.6.3 that it came with, and was still bootable after updating to 1.6.5 (rc1?) that is commonly available online*.
I think some confusion may have arisen at some point from the fact that neither card is able to find a bootable drive attached to them - it must be selected in the Startup Disk control panel in order to boot from it. This means that neither can be used to cold boot a Mac that has no pram battery, although a restart should presumably work...
This leads me to the first quandary. I have read some speculation that these cards are only bootable on Macs that have SCSI Manager (4.3?) in ROM, i.e. the AV Quadras and x100 PowerMacs onwards. Conventional wisdom dictates the 700 and 800 do not have this.
So, is the requirement to have SCSI Manager in ROM incorrect, or is it actually present in Macs earlier than the AV series?
Note that the SEIV user manual does not state this requirement anywhere that I have seen.
Unfortunately I don't have any II series Macs to try this in, so I don't know if the Quadras have some other secret sauce that allows booting? It seems to me that at least the SEII predates the Quadras? I have read one account in an old thread on here of a member who was able to boot his IIci from a SEIV, so ultimately I am just curious why people generally think these cards are not bootable?
*PSA: the updater starts flashing the firmware as soon as you open it. I opened it assuming it would at least ask me to confirm I wanted to proceed! Thankfully the new firmware does not seem to have changed any behaviour that I can see.
Contrary to most of what I have read about them, I have been successful in booting from both SE II and SE IV cards in my Quadras (700 and 800). In both cases there was no magic involved, just followed the instructions in the SEIV user manual and it Just Worked. I have the II in the 700 and the IV in the 800.
I don't know what firmware is on the SE II card, but the SE IV was previously bootable with 1.6.3 that it came with, and was still bootable after updating to 1.6.5 (rc1?) that is commonly available online*.
I think some confusion may have arisen at some point from the fact that neither card is able to find a bootable drive attached to them - it must be selected in the Startup Disk control panel in order to boot from it. This means that neither can be used to cold boot a Mac that has no pram battery, although a restart should presumably work...
This leads me to the first quandary. I have read some speculation that these cards are only bootable on Macs that have SCSI Manager (4.3?) in ROM, i.e. the AV Quadras and x100 PowerMacs onwards. Conventional wisdom dictates the 700 and 800 do not have this.
So, is the requirement to have SCSI Manager in ROM incorrect, or is it actually present in Macs earlier than the AV series?
Note that the SEIV user manual does not state this requirement anywhere that I have seen.
Unfortunately I don't have any II series Macs to try this in, so I don't know if the Quadras have some other secret sauce that allows booting? It seems to me that at least the SEII predates the Quadras? I have read one account in an old thread on here of a member who was able to boot his IIci from a SEIV, so ultimately I am just curious why people generally think these cards are not bootable?
*PSA: the updater starts flashing the firmware as soon as you open it. I opened it assuming it would at least ask me to confirm I wanted to proceed! Thankfully the new firmware does not seem to have changed any behaviour that I can see.