PCI-IDE Optical Drive Problems

[l008com]

So I picked up this card on eBay for $20. PCI IDE seems to be very hard to find, so I wanted to snatch it up even though it's ATA66. I hope it doesn't have the 120 GB drive limit, but if it does I'll live with it. 

So I plugged the card in (to my PowerMac 7300). I hooked up a 40 GB IDE drive, as master, to one bus. And an Apple/Sony branded IDE super drive, as master, to the other bus. This drive is out of a Mac Pro I believe. 

The hard drive works no problem. The optical drive does not. It won't boot off the optical, and it won't show a disc in the optical, if I boot off the hard drive. (I installed OS 8.1 on the hard drive using the SCSI optical drive). I tried the same thing with a non-apple branded Sony CD-ROM drive, and a lite-on CD-ROM drive. All optical drives are set as master and are solo on their bus. None of them will boot, none of them will show a disc on the desktop when booted off the hard drive, and all of them show up in System Profiler with the exact right info. For example:

I switched the drives, so the optical is on the HDD's previous cable and bus, and the HDD is on the optical's previous cable and bus. Still the HDD works great, and the optical drives not at all. 

Are there any quirks with master/slave/solo and optical drives? I'm out of ideas, as I've long since forgotten all of the details of doing stuff like this. But using newer modern (ish) IDE optical drives was the main reason I'm doing this. The IDE hard drive option is nice too, but I already have a very large SCSI drive so that's not a necessity. 

 

[bibilit]

On the same cable, if you have two devices, one should be Master (the first on the cable) and the second Slave (the last device)

Board--------Master---------Slave

The hard drive should always be Master, while the Cd rom should be slave.

i will try a setup with both units in the same bus.

Board------HD as Master------CD-Rom as Slave

With your setup, both of them should set as Master, you are correct, but IIRC both should be placed at the end of the cable.

Board-------X-----------Master

You can also try the "cable select" option for a test, never had any issue with the Master/Slave setup myself, but....

Also, the CD-Rom is detected in the same Bus as the Hard drive, so maybe the card is expecting a special setup ?

 

[l008com]

I'm pretty sure the position on the IDE cable doesn't matter if it's just one Master drive on the bus. However they were both on the end anyway. I can try a master/slave setup just to see, but due to the drive placement in this machine, I'm not sure I'll be able to do two drives on one IDE ribbon. 

Also I thought with two drives, it was supposed to be Board--------slave-------master? I thought the master was always at the logical and of the bus?

As far as both drives showing up on the same bus in system profiler... they both show up on a scsi bus, so I suspect this card simply shows all for possible drives it can see as ID0,1,2,3 on SCSI bus 2. Which makes sense for how these older cards are supposed to work.

 

[l008com]

I hate to be "that guy" that bumps, but.... *bump*

Let me ask a different question. Does anyone have any experience at all, successful or unsuccessful, using an IDE optical drive with a classic SCSI based Mac, via a PCI IDE card? 

 

[trag]

As I've written before, I have a DVD-ROM drive on an Acard 6280M in a Umax S900. I've been using it for years. Works great including for booting. The S900 is in the 9500/8500 family of hardware.

 

[l008com]

What brand is the DVDI 

As I've written before, I have a DVD-ROM drive on an Acard 6280M in a Umax S900. I've been using it for years. Works great including for booting. The S900 is in the 9500/8500 family of hardware.

What brand is the DVD ROM drive? Is it an Apple OEM drive? What jumper/cable position/bus setup to you use it in?

 

[waynestewart]

I tried installing a Sonnet ATA66 card in a beige G3. Connected a Pioneer DVDRW 115D to the cards IDE1 connector and had no trouble booting off an OS9 install disk. So I next attached a 120gb Seagate to IDE2 and that’s where I ran into difficulties. The G3 would boot off the optical drive but wouldn’t mount or initialize the HD.  Tried swapping them around, a different DVDRWdrive and tried a different Sonnet ATA66 card and no change.

I don’t have time right now to play around more but it looks like my cards at least in that G3 work with hard drives or optical drives but won’t work with a HD if I have an optical drive.

 

[trag]

I have two 160 GB Seagate drives on one IDE channel of the 6280M. The other channel has the DVDROM drive and a 40GB drive. I dont remembrr which is master and slave on the dvd/40gb channel, but it also never gave me any trouble so i never fiddled with it. The DVD is probably the slave.

I'm using SoftRAID on the two 160 GB drives to mirror all the volumes on them.

Oh, the DVD drive is some no-name drive I picked up cheap more than a deca d e ago. It's lasted longer in service than any name brand drive I've ever bought. Certainly not an Apple drive.

 

[l008com]

I tried installing a Sonnet ATA66 card in a beige G3. Connected a Pioneer DVDRW 115D to the cards IDE1 connector and had no trouble booting off an OS9 install disk. So I next attached a 120gb Seagate to IDE2 and that’s where I ran into difficulties. The G3 would boot off the optical drive but wouldn’t mount or initialize the HD.  Tried swapping them around, a different DVDRWdrive and tried a different Sonnet ATA66 card and no change.

I don’t have time right now to play around more but it looks like my cards at least in that G3 work with hard drives or optical drives but won’t work with a HD if I have an optical drive.

So based on this, I tried just the optical drive hooked up to the IDE card with no hard drives, and it immediately mounted the CD. I'm going to keep fiddling with it, hopefully I can come up with a way to get a hard drive and a CD drive to work. At least I'm making progress though.

 

[l008com]

Ok after getting the CD drive to work with no IDE drives (only SCSI), I then went back to my initial setup, IDE optical and IDE hard drive, both masters on a 1 drive IDE bus. And now it seems to be working perfectly. I can't explain it, but I'm just happy it's working properly. Hopefully it stay's working. As soon as my SATA to IDE adapter arrives, I can start setting up this SATA laptop hard drives as this Mac's primary hard drive going forward. The nostalgia addict in me is going to miss that loud HD sound that old Macs make. But the rest of me is going to be happy that I can turn this old Mac on without the brain piercing squeal. 

 

[l008com]

... and after about a solid day of working great, suddenly and for no reason, I am unable to mount any optical discs in my optical drive again. This is very strange. 

 

[l008com]

Ok I've figured something out, and I don't understand it. But after many boots off different volumes on this Mac, it turns out that:

The CD Drive works normally under System 7.5.5, Mac OS 8.6 and Mac OS 9

The CD Drive will not mount it's inserted disc under Mac OS 7.6.1 and Mac OS 8.1

What do you guys make of this? There are no drivers installed, so it's not like I have drivers on some of these OSes and not others. You would think it was somehow an "age" thing, where 8.1 and older don't support this optical configuration somehow.. BUT OH WAIT, it works totally fine in System 7.5.5 of all places!! 

 

[trag]

There is a CD-ROM extension in the System folder. It sounds like either your drive is supported some places and not others, or some of your system installs are missing the extension. In later OSs it's a DVD extension.

The CDROM extension that installs with 7.6 does not check whether it's an Apple drive. The one in 7.6.1 does. You might want to extract the gregarious version from 7.6 and try it around.

 

[l008com]

My optical drive IS an Apple IDE drive. All of these OSes are fresh, clean full installs. Neither of the systems that can't see the drive, have the CD ROM extension disabled. It's very odd. I'll see what 7.6.0 thinks of things...