SEIV for my IIci?

[rafthe030]

I boughta pair of Atto SEIV on ebay about half a month ago. My first goal was to get one of those "monsters" to work with my mac IIci which boots mac OS 8.1 (mostly) on a large 72 gb Fujitsu 10000rpm ultrascsi drive. When they shipped: first thing should have known before was that those two cards weren't always well-treated.

I couldn't see it on the only picture on the listing, but four or five pins on a chip for each card were bent and causing short-circuit. Since I wanted these cards so bad, I spent (almost 2hrs) to straighten them up correctly with a sharp blade. What a waste.

I put the first one in my IIci -- On bootup, unimplemented trap occurs before inits start to load. Same for the second one. To make sure that they were in working state, I put both of them separately in my Power Macintosh 7100 with its Crescendo G3 disabled. Both of them didn't crash, were able to see any hard drive I would connect to it, and were bootable after updating the firmware to 1.6.5 (I didn't try to boot before doing it).

I also flashed one with version 2.1rc2 and tried it on both machines; I had problems to boot from it using my Powermac, and my IIci wouldn't see any hard drive at all, but boots, though both see the controller.

I gathered the following three informations about the behaviour of both cards during last week:

• My IIci won't detect the card at all when in 24-bit mode, so zapping PRAM can get it to boot anyway when the 1.6.5 one is in;

• Depending on the disk driver, trying to boot on the controller card's drive from my powermac may fail and prevent Mac os from seeing any partition on it (a reboot with another boot drive set is necessary to see them again);

• (Found randomly) Holding cmd-opt.-shift-backspace RIGHT AFTER seeing happy mac on my IIci makes it boot and detect the card correctly, but no hard drive on the bus is detected.

I really am out of ideas right now, what's going on? If someone can help me out in any way, It would be greatly appreciated. I am sure both cards are working, since they didn't make my 7100 crash.

 

[CC_333]

Have you tried an older version of Mac OS? It sounds like there's some sort of incompatibility somewhere.

Try System 7.5. That version seems to be a good middle ground in terms of being compatible with things (and it runs on basically Mac from the II through most pre-G3 Power Macs).

Another possibility is that they're simply not compatible with the IIci (perhaps requiring a Quadra or Power Mac instead).

c

 

[rafthe030]

I tried on 7.5 on my powermac and 7.1 on my IIci. 7.5 works fine.

I just thought about something. Can a mac IIci use two scsi buses at once? The only thing i havent mentionned is that I boot from my onboard scsi while the card is on. I'm going to try it only with a drive on the SEIV. Atto never mentionned in their manuals that you could use both buses. The only instructions are for using the same drive with the Silicon Express IV.

 

[Unknown_K]

There are 2 versions of the SEIV, one for HVD (differential) and LVD (low voltage differential). There should be a symbol on the metal bracket you can lookup on the web to see what you have. HVD and LVD do not mix.

There should be terminators on the card itself to configure how it works if you are using both the 50 pin and 68 pin connectors.

Unless you have a beta firmware the SEIV is not bootable, people used them for RAID arrays not for primary OS drives.

You will need a special software (Anubis) to format drive connected to the SEIV (normal drive formatters don't work).

 

[rafthe030]

If the card isn't bootable, I am a bit confused for the fact I managed to boot on the drive connected to it.

I gave up on getting it to work on my IIci after another week of unsuccessful attempts.

At least my Power Macintosh can use it.

 

[trag]

If the card isn't bootable, I am a bit confused for the fact I managed to boot on the drive connected to it.

I gave up on getting it to work on my IIci after another week of unsuccessful attempts.

At least my Power Macintosh can use it.

It's probably bootable in Macs which have SCSI Manager in their ROM, which includes the Power Macintoshes and does not include the IIci.

I believe that the AV Quadras were the first machines with SCSI Manager in ROM and all machines after that had it.

The FWB Jackhammer card has SCSI Manager in its boot ROM on the card. Also the Daystar Turbo 601 loads SCSI Manager from its on board firmware.

An interesting B.Braun project would be to add SCSI Manager to the early machines using Doug's custom ROM module.