Biege G3 - PCI IDE adaptors & disk initialisation

[Megatron-uk]

Beige G3 Tower

Powerlogix G3 1GHz ZIF

768Mb

Sonnet Tempo Ultra ATA 66 PCI (i)

Acard AEC-6280M PCI (ii)

Various IDE drives tested; Maxtor Diamondmax 9 and 10 in 200GB flavours, and Seagate Barracuda 200GB and 320GB.

I'm attempting to reinstall OS 9 on this old G3 of mine - part of the reason was to remove the old 6GB drive and fit one of a few spare 200GB or 320GB IDE disks I have around.

Booting from the OS 9 cd with any of the above drives attached to the Sonnet card (i) I get the disk (listed as SCSI, which I believe is correct) listed in Drive Utility, but a size of 120GB shown, which I believe is the LBA48 limitation of the card - not really a problem as I cannot imagine using all the space anyway. However any attempt to initialise the drive (regardless of partition settings or low-level/zero options) always fails immediately with a 'initialisation failed' message. With the Acard (ii) installed instead the drives show with their correct size (LBA48 supported on this card), but drive initialisation still always fails. All the tested drives have been tried with master/slave/cable-select jumper positions; it only seems to make a difference to the initial 'scanning bus' time, but nothing more.

I need to get this machine up and running so that I can make some install floppies for a IIci that I've just acquired as it seems to have a bad hard drive (boot fails, even with extensions disabled).

Anyone got either of these two PCI IDE cards and seen similar disk initialisation issues? Am I missing something? This appears from the documentation from Acard and Sonnet as though it should just work out of the box.

 

[beachycove]

I had no problems whatsoever with a 500GB drive and a Sonnet ATA-133 card, nor with a Sonnet ATA-66 card, years ago. It has been a long time, but I seem to recall something about needing to initialize the new drive as a SCSI device rather than IDE. I have not read the manual recently, so this may be totally off the wall, but what may be happening is that your machine is trying to initialize the drive as an IDE device rather than as SCSI. In my case, I did the initialization in an 8600, so Drive Setup was expecting a SCSI device. The G3, of course, is a very different animal, and that may be the problem. Weren't these cards designed specifically for machines with no IDE bus?

Some suggestions: 1. You could try formatting something smaller, like an old 10GB drive, and see how you get on. 2. You could connect an old scsi drive to the G3's scsi connector, install a system, and try the initialization from it. 3. You could do the deed in an older beige PPC like I did.

The other obvious question is master/slave jumpers, but I take it that you have that covered.

 

[waynestewart]

I have the 6260M. Booted OS9.1 on a beige G3 and used Drive Setup to format a 180 gb drive. Worked fine.

Have you tried ACARDs firmware update?

 

[Megatron-uk]

I'm not sure of the firmware version on the 6280M right now - I'll add the original 6GB drive back in and see if the firmware update is applicable.

I haven't tried a non-LBA48 drive yet on either card (ie like the original 6GB disk), so I'll try that after a firmware check of the Acard.

 

[waynestewart]

When you use ACARDs firmware updater it first tells you the firmware version on the card and the version it wants to install. Then it asks you if you want to proceed or not

 

[trag]

I have a Beige G3 tower with an Acard 6280M and two 120GB Seagate drives and one 160 GB Seagate drive attached to the 6280M. I did not have trouble initializing any of the drives. I can't remember whether I did the bulk of the initialization in OSX (I have Jaguar on the machine) or OS 9.1.

Could you be using an older version of Drive Setup which is trying to do a SCSI format on the ATA drives? You only want to initialize them, not format them. I don't really understand the difference, but I remember back in the day of switching from SCSI to IDE, one had to be careful not to perform a SCSI format on ATA drives attached to our machines through a third party card.

See if you can get a copy of Disk Utility from OS 9.2.2 or some such on there and try using that.