Sil3112 flashing (SATA)

[max1zzz]

ohh nice! just wish those damn chips where easier to find in the UK

You tried booting any of the cards yet?

Also, if you leave the computer powered up dose it run ok? my pc card with the webietech fw my B/W was always crashing...

EDIT: is the speed of the chip important? i can get the 120ns varient of the AM29LV040B for £3 from israel, which has pretty good shipping times to the uk in my experiance

 

[dougg3]

I haven't tried booting yet because I don't have a spare SATA drive to play with. I haven't left the computer on for long periods of time but I haven't seen any kind of a crash yet...also since the PCB is different we can't be certain that everything will be fully compatible, but it seems OK so far.

The Sil3112 seems to be configurable for 120 ns or 240 ns flash chips according to its datasheet. I'd say 120 ns is safe to use...

 

[max1zzz]

Ahh good, guess it was something about the webie firmware.

Booting shall be the first thing i try then when i have converted my card

will order myself a chip tomorrow (just in case the original chip i ordered actually turns up tomorrow)

 

[max1zzz]

ok, the chip actually arrived, did the 3.3v mod and swapped the chip

took several attempts but finally got dosflash to report code 0.

the card seems to be reporting it's self just like yours do.

however when i plugged a drive in i got nothing.... went to reboot and the b/w g3 has decided to start not booting again. hopefully it is just a bad sata cable (had this when testing cards before)

Edit: replaced the sata cable and it seems to be working cloneing my boot disk to it now... then we will see if it's bootable

 

[max1zzz]

And i can confirm, the converted cards are bootable cloned my boot drive and booted right up from the card

might go stick this card into my 8600 and see if it works under os 8 or 9....

though, i am getting some compatibility problems, my B/W G3 keeps kping wth it in, and my 2001 QS just won't boot with it (though that is to do with the card, not the firmware did the same thing with the pc fw)

Edit, i can also confirm the card works under mac os 9, however it dosen't appear to be bootable under mac os 9

 

[trag]

Just to be clear...

It's not just the Firmtek updater which checks for a supported flash chip, but the actual firmware on the card checks for a supported flash chip and will not load itself during the boot process if the flash chip is not supported?

Is that correct?

 

[dougg3]

And i can confirm, the converted cards are bootable cloned my boot drive and booted right up from the card

Excellent, good work! Hmm, interesting that your B/W G3 is kernel panicing. I'll have to extensively test it with the card to see if I can make it happen...

Is that correct?

Pretty much. Actually, as best as i can tell, the FirmTek updater doesn't check for a supported flash chip at all, it only checks for whether the flash chip already has FirmTek firmware on it.

The firmware extracts a couple of kexts into OS X, and one of the kexts checks for supported flash chips during the OS X boot process and fails to load if the board doesn't have a supported flash chip. (In fact, on a newer revision of the firmware that they don't have available on the website for download, it causes a kernel panic...)

 

[max1zzz]

Yes, there are two kexts that extract themselfs from the card at boot, if the flash I'd dosen't match it will stop them loading, this giving you a non working card

Dougg3 tried patching and manually loading these kexts, which gave him a working card with a 'unsupported' flash chip, but this gives you a non bootable card

Edit: Seems dougg3 beat me to it...

Edit2: I am wondering if the problems are more to do with my g3 than the card, it seems extremely picky about booting and staying stable. I tested it with a spare 2.5" SATA drive and it worked fine and was perfectly stable, but with a couple of 3.5 wd's it vary's from failing to get past the apple logo, to freezing to random kp's

With the sawtooth it is stable with whatever drive I seem to give it

 

[max1zzz]

i'm beginning to think the problem is actually the ATA bus in my g3, after all i have a rev 1 logicboard, it seems the crashes mostly happen when copying data from the internal hdd to the sata one, copying no data, or installing from cd it seems to be fairly stable

 

[dougg3]

Could be. My B&W has a rev 1 logic board too, but I also have an older IDE drive from that era that didn't have the reliability problems of newer, faster drives in those machines.

Maybe switching entirely to SATA will make your machine more reliable!

 

[olePigeon]

Sonnet says their cards work with Mac OS 9, will these as well? Is it the same firmware?

 

[Renegade]

Yes, it is.

 

[max1zzz]

dougg3, yeah, think i might stick the card + a 80gb drive in the g3 and do a clean install of osx and see if it's stable then

Renegade, Is that card bootable? I tried booting mac os 9.1 from the card but my G3 just refused to boot it

 

[Renegade]

Max: YES !!! :beige: :beige:

I tested it in a G4 QS DP800 with OS 9.2.2

IIRC, that firmware was supposed to be compatible with MacOS ≥ 7.6.1 . Am I wrong ?

I could test 8.0/8.1 on a Beige G3, but I don't have any older PCI PowerMac in working condition.

 

[max1zzz]

intresting..... i'll throw my card into the sawtooth tonight and see if it boots... i did think it was odd the card booted osx but not os9

Is that a modified card or a firmtek / sonnet one?

 

[Renegade]

Thanks to your discussion with Doug, it's a flashed one.

I bought a few of those cards with a 512KB chip last year when somebody told us about in this topic.

I had to use the UPDFLASH.EXE dos flasher to feed them with Firmtek's ROMFILE.1S2.



The red one is a genuine Ratoc (= Firmtek), the green one is the flashed one.

Here's the chip:

 

[max1zzz]

Aha, got the sawtooth booting os9 off a SATA drive

Out of intrest, did that card come with the correct flash chip installed or did you swap it yourself?

 

[Renegade]

That's the original flash chip.

See post #4 in this topic.

 

[dougg3]

Glad to hear you got it working Renegade So what did you have to do differently if it came with the correct flash chip already? You said in your original post that you flashed the SeriTek firmware to it with the DOS utility but it wasn't recognized correctly. Just curious.

max1zzz, glad to hear you have it working on your Sawtooth now, so why wasn't it working before?

 

[Renegade]

Glad to hear you got it working Renegade So what did you have to do differently if it came with the correct flash chip already? You said in your original post that you flashed the SeriTek firmware to it with the DOS utility but it wasn't recognized correctly. Just curious.

Thank you Doug.

I don't understand why it failed last year... Could have been a problem with my Quicksilver, or with the PC mobo I used for flashing. :lol: