Sil3112 flashing (SATA)

[max1zzz]

not entirely sure why it didn't work, the drive i installed os 9 onto didn't boot in the sawtooth either, so i copied the system folder to a different drive and it booted just fine.

Also wondering, anyone have any idea why my quicksilver won't boot with the card insalled? it chimes but gives no video and no disk activity, works with a flashed sil3512, but there not bootable

 

[trag]

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:

Doh! Goes in the "Always try it yourself" file. I'm the one who suggested those cards, then after Renegade's posting where it didn't work, I put it aside and didn't try it myself, figuring it would take more effort.

I have a chip programmer. I could have lifted the socketed chip and installed the firmware and had a working card all this time. Possibly in time to purchase more of those nice socketed boards with the 4 Mb chips already installed. Just so I'm clear, I do not blame Renegade at all. He reported his experience. I just should have tried it myself.

Still, it's nice to have the explicitly explored information that Doug has generated. Now we know what will and won't work and why.

 

[olePigeon]

Anyone have a source for more of those cheap cards? Seem to have dried up.

 

[max1zzz]

if you don't mind soldering: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/2-Port-SATA-Serial-ATA-PCI-Controller-Card-/300726465244?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_15&hash=item4604b1b2dc

 

[trag]

Low probability of success, but I PM'd the seller on Ebay to ask if they would or could offer any more of that card. I mentioned that the socket AM29LV040 chip makes them versatile and there's a group of us on a forum who are interested in more of them.

The good news is that I received a response already. The bad news is that this, in total, was the response:

"no"

 

[max1zzz]

Maybe some people here could manufacture a few, i would be more than happy to make some mac os compatible cards, however i don't know how practical shipping them to places like the US would be

On another note, my g3 is much more stable running off just the sata card

 

[MacJunky]

I would actually draw the line at selling them. I mean, if you want to toss the compatible EEPROM on a generic card and resell it with a PC firmware, fine. but selling these flashed with mac compatible fimware feels wrong. Same goes for GFX cards. If someone flashes it themselves then okay, but there are a couple people making a business out of flashing and then selling with an incredibly marked up price claiming they are some sort of god and that is not cool imho. :disapprove:

 

[max1zzz]

yeah i agree, i wouldn't say it's right to buy a £4 card and sell them on for a huge markup. If i did it i would be selling the cards for £7 or £8.

 

[dougg3]

Fully agreed about not selling these with Mac firmware. The firmware is copyrighted, and it's not like it's a dead product--Sonnet still sells the actual card for $80. I'm with MacJunky, I think the limit would be soldering a new chip to the PC card and selling it with PC firmware on it.

 

[max1zzz]

Fair point, I didn't cosider the copywrite aspect, bad idea to sell them with the mac firmware then.

Anyway i'm gonna order a few more, interested to see if these work in my Xserve G4 (which can be very picky when it comes to pic cards)

Hmm... Seems 10.4.11 breaks boot ability of my G3, gets to the gray screen then gives the no access sign (still waiting for rot device...).Was booting fine with 10.4.6

Edit: still boots fine in safe mode

 

[dougg3]

Hmm, weird. I would recommend to try booting into safe mode, running FSCAPP that is bundled with the firmware updater, and rebooting. That clears all the kext caches so that you can rule out something weird going on with the driver.

 

[max1zzz]

Yep, that got it

EDIT: seems I was jumping ahead of myself saying the crashes where down to the card, just found the last stick of ram was bad (oddly it passes memory tests, but fails in the real world). Noticed it would crash when it got down to the last 10mb of free ram

 

[Renegade]

Bad, or rejected by a B&W G3 ?

It's not the same :lol:

Those seem to become pickier about ram quality.

 

[max1zzz]

It was actually bad,

Yesterday i was haveing some boot troubles after a clean install of osx (no chime, nothing onscreen) i tried reseating the ram and ended up putting the first stick into the last slot, and that caused it to boot.

booted into single user and ran a 5 pass mem test, every test compleated just fine, so i thought no more of it

then it started crashing again, no kp's but just hard lockups whenever i got down to about 10mb free ram. so i pulled the last stick out and it booted just fine, no lockups.

At least it is just a 64Mb stick would have been gutted if it was one of my few 512mb sticks

 

[eastone]

Socket is already soldered. Now I'm waiting for the right chip

 

[max1zzz]

ooh, nice, seems they will fit then

did you set the voltage jumper? looks like the 5v one is still jumped there

Anyone know if there is a updater fro the later version of the firmware (the one that is shipped on the cards)?

 

[eastone]

Yes it's 5V now but I have access to change to 3V

 

[harrymatic]

Sorry to bump an old thread, but I thought I'd share my experience flashing one of these cards.

I picked a fairly cheap SIL3112 card up off eBay for about £10 (http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/400502065376). I could have spent less had I bought it directly from China, but I wanted it quickly. The flash-ROM chip on the card is 128k.



I used the WiebeTech 3112 PCI firmware to flash the card with, although I had to get it from the Internet Archive as the download is no longer listed on WiebeTech's site. (http://web.archive.org/web/20081205192504/http://www.wiebetech.com/download.php?id=120) The next hurdle I ran into was that the included firmware flashing utility didn't want to work for me. Instead, I used a hex editor to join the two 64k ROM images into one large 128k image. Having done this, I used the UPDFLASH.EXE utility on a DOS boot floppy and an old PC to flash the card with the new firmware.

Once this was done, I tried it out in my FW800 G4 and it had worked perfectly, and I was able to boot from a SATA drive connected to the card:



The whole process was far simpler than I had imagined it might be - I didn't even have to turn on the soldering iron once!

 

[max1zzz]

intresting....

You shouldn't need to join the two files, as one is the pc firmware and one is the mac one, just pad out the mac image

oh, and i don't know if this would work for you, but i found getting the webie flasher to write a blank 128k file and then haveing it write a padded out mac firmware got it to work (nothing else would get it to work)

 

[protocol7]

Padding out the Wiebe firmware should be enough. If you look at the end of it in a hex editor you can see that it's already been padded out to 64k. Just add another 64k of Fs to it until the firmware is 128k (131072 bytes) in size and then flash with updflash from a DOS bootdisk.

I inserted the padding before the last line. I'm not exactly sure what that string at the end is for but all the SATA roms have the same value, regardless of the version. The RAID one I checked has two bytes changed so perhaps it's related to the device ID.

If only we could get a firmware from the Mathey MSATA-P02MAC. That supports OS9 booting and the eeprom is only 512k so it'll easily fit on most 3112s.