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CF Card in a Blue G3

VMSZealot

Well-known member
I thought that this would be so simple. A nice, CF based, SSD for my blue and white G3. It works in my PC - so what could possibly go wrong? CompactFlash is based on IDE after all, and the adaptor is pretty dumb.

Well, firstly, if it’s on the same bus as the hard drive it won’t boot. Master or slave, it doesn’t matter - the Mac won’t start. If I unplug the optical drive and use that bus then it will, after a delay boot.

But now the drive won’t show in Disk Utility when booted with Tiger. System Profiler will see the drive, and correctly identifies it as a SanDisk.

Okay. A different approach is needed. Boot into MacOS 9 and use Disk Utility there. Aha! It sees it. So I try to format it and… damn. It gets about half way through formatting and then dies, and having died wont see the drive at all - or even boot if the half formatted drive is connected.

I have a few CF cards, ranging from 512MB to 32GB. All fail in the same way. Does anyone have any idea as to what might be amiss there? Has anyone succeeded in using a CF card as an SSD in a Mac?

I realise I could use a PCI SATA card in the G3 and just go for a more modern technology - but that won’t work with an old, non-PCI, Performa (which, incidentally, also fails to boot with a CF card present).
 

CircuitBored

Well-known member
Do you know which revision of B+W G3 you have? The first revision machines have very unstable and buggy IDE controllers - a problem they share with the beige G3s.

It's easy to check whether you have one of the bad IDE controllers. With the door open and the PCI slots on the right, look at the top right corner of the logic board. If you see a chip labelled 646U2-402 then you have a second revision B+W G3. If your chip is labelled PCI646U2 or just 646U2 then you have an early logic board revision with a bad IDE controller.

If yours is one of the early boards then you have a few options for working around it:

  1. Replace the IDE controller chip. This is hard work and requires special equipment but it means you can keep the machine's original logic board installed.
  2. Replace the entire logic board. This is relatively easy but means you are sacrificing the originality of the machine. You can also install the logic board from an early PowerMac G4, opening the door to dual-CPU upgrades.
  3. Install a PCI storage controller and use that instead. PCI ATA controllers for Mac are becoming very hard to come by and rather expensive. If you want a SATA controller then you can reflash a SIL3112-based card, with the small caveat of needing to replace the ROM chip if you want to be able to install the full firmware that supports OS8+.
Investigate your built-in IDE controller and let us know what you find!
 

VMSZealot

Well-known member
It’s a late model G3 - so no problems on that score, and as I say it also fails to work in my Performa 630.
 

CircuitBored

Well-known member
as I say it also fails to work in my Performa 630.

My bad, I totally missed the last line of your original post!

Please could you share a link to/photo of your CF adapter? I have one made by StarTech in my B+W G3 and it works like a charm. I also have a 2.5-inch version in a PowerBook G4 that works without issue.
 

macuserman

Well-known member
I actually bought the owc kit with ssd and when I put it in my performa it won’t boot until I unplug it so I am having a similar problem although it’s with an ssd not a compact flash.
 

LaPorta

Well-known member
I am almost 100% certain that the OWC SSD kit will not work properly in the Performa no matter what. If you are talking about the "legacy" SSD kit they sell, it should theoretically work ok with the G3.
 

macuserman

Well-known member
I am almost 100% certain that the OWC SSD kit will not work properly in the Performa no matter what. If you are talking about the "legacy" SSD kit they sell, it should theoretically work ok with the G3.
Ugh really? I figured IDE adapter so it should work any reason why it won't in particular or another adapter that might actually work? I guess I should start my own thread on this.
 

LaPorta

Well-known member
Ugh really? I figured IDE adapter so it should work any reason why it won't in particular or another adapter that might actually work? I guess I should start my own thread on this.
Assuming this is what you have, here are the compatibility options:

 

macuserman

Well-known member
Assuming this is what you have, here are the compatibility options:

Yes that is what I bought, but I figured I might be able to make it work anyways, I'd like to understand more about what is actually the issue with compatibility.
 

VMSZealot

Well-known member
I bought the Startech - and it works perfectly in the G3. Thanks for the suggestion. It doesn't work in the Performa though. It looks like the Performa tries to see it - but it fails. If I try to start using the CD (cmd-opt-shift-delete) then the CD hangs part way through boot, and the read light on the Startech adaptor flickers frantically. I'm guessing from this that there's no way to use this in a 68K Mac…
 

LaPorta

Well-known member
My way around that on the Quadra 630 I set up for my kids was to rig the internal SCSI to run a SCSI2SD, and left the IDE bus empty.
 

tevruden

Member
I bought the Startech - and it works perfectly in the G3. Thanks for the suggestion. It doesn't work in the Performa though. It looks like the Performa tries to see it - but it fails. If I try to start using the CD (cmd-opt-shift-delete) then the CD hangs part way through boot, and the read light on the Startech adaptor flickers frantically. I'm guessing from this that there's no way to use this in a 68K Mac…

I had similar issues with a Performa 630 series and issue wasn't the adapter, it was the flash card. I had to replace the SanDisk card I used with this one: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00009967Y/
 

VMSZealot

Well-known member
I’ve tried two CF cards, neither worked. I also tried a SCSI to IDE with the adaptor - that didn’t work either. So yes, I think it might be a BlueSCSI SD card job now - except that the performance of BlueSCSI doesn’t even seem to reach the speed of an old hard disk.
 

markyb86

Well-known member
I used one of those janky ebay CF>IDE adapters in my B&W, with a bit of finagling. It wouldn't work set to master or slave, but CS worked. It's on the primary IDE by itself and a DVDRW is on the secondary IDE by itself. DVDRW is set to CS as well. I was able to install Jaguar & Tiger from CD no issue, but could not get OS9 to boot from any of my disks no matter what I tried while this adapter was connected.

EDIT: I needed to format the CF card on my linux PC as FAT before the OSX installer disk utility would see it, as well.
 

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
It doesn't work in the Performa though.

This is a Known Issue with the 630 and everything descended from it: 6200, 5200, 6300, 5300, PowerBook 5300, PowerBook 1400, and Duo 2300, plus sub-models and name variants. It pertains to the "removable bit" in the CF card itself, most of them are set to removable because they are, well, removable.

Some, (but not all AFAIK) industrial-use CF cards that were meant to go inside Industrial Machinery had that bit set as not-removable and will work in the 630+.

It may be more worthwhile looking for the SD card adapter though. Those are known to work well with the 6200s, as far as I can tell either the SD card doesn't have that property or something about the adapters masks that property and then Apple's formatting utilities are happy.

There's some more details in this thread: https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/help-ide-to-compact-flash-not-working.38648/
 

LaPorta

Well-known member
I believe my 1400 lists the internal IDE to SD card media as "removable" in the Apple System Profiler, but it works fine anyway with the adapter I have.
 

Gorgonops

Moderator
Staff member
IDE is just plain janky in the B&W, even the supposedly "fixed" ones. (As it is on similar era machines, like the tray-loading iMac, Beige G3, etc.) I ran into all sorts of random compatibility issues with those things back in the day with normal hard disks.

It may be more worthwhile looking for the SD card adapter though. Those are known to work well with the 6200s, as far as I can tell either the SD card doesn't have that property or something about the adapters masks that property and then Apple's formatting utilities are happy.

For most retro purposes I have decided I like these SD card adapters a *lot* better than CF cards. Ironically perhaps the chipset used in those SD cards adapters was actually designed to emulate a CF card (it's found in adapters for putting SD cards into CF slots in addition to the PATA->IDE applications), but in my experience that chipset has excellent compatibility with both "True IDE" and oddball CF modes like 8-bit ATA-2 compatibility (which a lot of actual CF cards fall down on) and is more trustworthy than the real thing. Just use a decent quality SD card, preferably a high-utilization rated one. (I buy the ones rated for use in continuous video streaming applications; in a slow computer they should last for years even if they start swapping.)
 
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