Gee Three

[Hrududu]

I've got 2 rev 1 B&W G3 systems. One has 3 internal HD's and an optical, and the other has 2 internal HD's plus internal ZIP and optical. Never had any problems with data corruption etc.

Share me your secrets then

After a day of total disappointment I needed something good to happen before retiring for the night so I went ahead and tried to flash my 2940UW card with the Mac bios................... and it worked.

No secret. It just works. I've had one of them (the 450MHz with 2 drives) up and running with multiple drives since 2002.

 

[Gorgonops]

...but on reboot it won't boot from the disk. Just the flashing system folder icon.

Teh Google seems to imply a few things about the PowerDomain 2940:

1: To be bootable on a B&W it needs a specific firmware version. (4.1 or better?) What did you put on your 2940UW?

2: There were a lot of suggestions that you use OS 8.6, or at least have some specific patch to 8.5.1, to avoid some sort of PCI bus handling bug in straight 8.5.1.

It wouldn't surprise me if a flashed card had some strange issue with booting. There are a lot of odd variations of the 2940 card/hardware and perhaps the Mac BIOS only really works 100% with a few specific ones.

EDIT: A NetBSD mailer thread on mac firmware variations for the 2940 family:

http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-macppc/2001/04/27/0000.html

 

[protocol7]

@Hrududu: Guess you're one of the lucky ones. The IDE corruption is widely mentioned on xlr8yourmac with the Rev.1 boards. Plenty of ideas but none have worked for me so far. Can you tell me what drives you're using and how you have them cabled/jumpered? I'm not looking for a multi-drive setup, just one. I'm down to a 10GB Seagate here and it corrupts straight away. Still haven't managed to install an OS after 3 days. The drive is perfect, I've ran SMART and surface tests. The logic board checks out in MacTest Pro. I had 4x256 sticks of PC133 in it initially, but to rule them out I'm down to a single 64mb stick of PC100 and still no dice.

@Gorgonops: It was the 4.1 firmware. Moot point anyway as OS X Server didn't like it (no drives found). I was afraid something like that would happen but had to try it anyway. Tried to install it to the 10GB Seagate IDE but after a while of copying files it KP-ed with "ffs_clusteralloc: map mismatch".

 

[Gorgonops]

@Gorgonops: It was the 4.1 firmware.

Reading between the lines on Adaptec's download page... what kind of machine did you flash the card in? From the way it reads it appears that if you used a beige Power Mac it *might* install that "A/V 4.1" version referred to in the NetBSD thread", IE, wrong for a B&W firmware. (The line "Make sure that you flash your 2940UW in the system that you intend to use it." in the instructions is sort of suspicious.)

 

[protocol7]

The update had two seperate flashers so I could have used either (I picked the non-A/V). I flashed in on my Gigabit Ethernet as I needed to boot into an OS to run the updater. I guess I could have put it on a USB stick and ran it on the G3 from the iMac OS9 boot cd that I've been using but I don't know if that would have made any difference. As I said, if OSXS doesn't like it, then it's no use to me.

 

[Gorgonops]

Woot. That's too bad.

I sort of lost track... did you try using a different IDE cable? If that fails then in theory you probably should be able to put a drive on the same bus as the CD-ROM drive in a master-slave relationship. They'd run at the same speed as the built-in IDE on a Beige G3. (Either UDMA mode 0 or PIO mode 4, forget which.) I believe I've heard of that being done.

 

[protocol7]

I'm losing track a little myself. It's been two solid days of trying everything and anything. I know I did try to slave the drive off the cdrom and I think the Mac just refused to boot. I tried using a 40-pin IDE cable too but it made no difference either. I'm pretty much lost at this stage.

Not sure if I tried this already, but I'll try connecting the hard disk to the slower ATA channel and the cdrom to the faster. See if that takes care of things. Then I have to see if OSXS will install on that config.

I think I did try it already but didn't leave it long enough. The cdrom will eventually boot if attached to the faster channel but it takes a long time (2 mins 13 seconds from chime to happy mac). It seems to boot at ok speed after that so I guess it must be waiting for something to time-out. The Seagate is on the slow controller with the jumper set to CS. I'll see what happens when I try to install.

 

[protocol7]

OS X Server is installing!

Switching the cables seems to work for now, albeit with some caveats:

1) Boot time is slow. I wait, I get the blinking system folder/question mark for a while. Then it sits on the system folder, then it boots. Normally I wouldn't see any of that.

2) I can't boot from CD by holding down C as it will just sit there forever on a grey screen. Instead I have to let it boot into MacOS and pick the CD in the Startup Disk panel. I also don't know what speed this disk is running at yet, but I'll find out later. Hell the SCSI disk benched at 12mb/sec so it has to be better than that.

Something I did notice was that in one of the initial stages of setup, OSXS wrote it's boot info into OF. Now when it reboots it starts up from the hard disk straight away, so perhaps the key to the boot delay is in there.

I'm not going to call this a complete victory as I'd like to get to the bottom of the IDE mystery so I can get it working properly. But I have finally gotten OSXS installed and I got to dabble a little with SCSI along the way too.

 

[H3NRY]

I never got cable select to work with my rev 1 B&W G3. I used a 40-wire cable and jumpered the drive as master on the fast channel. That worked with several of the IDE drives I tried. No slave drive. Still, it was limited to one <128GB drive, and I eventually bought a PCI IDE/SATA controller card. The final fix was picking up a rev 2 G3 for $15 and combining the best parts from both to make one Mac. The other problem I have with my B&W is flaky FireWire transfers over about 100 MB. I can copy single files OK, but backing up a drive to an external FW drive never worked. It's running Tiger 10.4.11.

 

[protocol7]

I haven't gotten anywhere near testing Firewire yet, but it's something I rarely ever use anyway. I changed the cable to a short 40-pin one and tried setting the jumper to master but this 10GB Seagate still corrupted when attached to the proper controller. The only way I've found to get it working on this is to use Hard Disk Toolkit to disable UDMA. The problem then is that OSXS doesn't like it and refuses to install. If I was just going with regular MacOS this wouldn't be an issue.

Performance-wise the hard disk clocks about 13.6mb/sec on the wrong channel and 14 on the proper one with UDMA disabled so the only real advantage I can see in keeping the disk on the proper controller is being able to boot from CD by holding down C. This doesn't work when I have the cables swapped and can be a bit awkward. That and tidier cabling.

In time I'd like to replace this disk with something quieter as the motor is quite loud. Plus it's only 5400RPM. I'm not sure how well OSXS works with add-on IDE cards but chances are I'd end up finding a Rev.2 G3 for less than the price of a card off eBay.

 

[MacJunky]

Contact WiebeTech and ask if the TCS1-1 can be used to boot off an HDD with OSXS. (it probably can, since the firmware supports booting OS X, but not 9 - don tell em bout the flashing though)

If yes, drop by a pc shop and get a PCI based SATA controller with silicon image 3512 (Sil3512) chipset and flash it.

Or hell, even if they say no get one anyway for use in another Mac.

Alternatively, if there is someone on the western side of Canada who wants to mail me a copy of an OSXS disc I would try it out with a Sil3512 card in my rev1 and rev2 B&W G3 mobos.

 

[protocol7]

I'm edging closer towards just looking for a stock 6Gb drive at this stage. For what I want to use the G3 for it's plenty and I know it'll work fine. With the cables swapped I was able to install from OSXS 1.0 up to OS X DP1. DP2 and up "can't find root device" if the drive isn't on the proper channel and then fail with corrupted files when it is. I also had to disconnect the Zip drive whilst doing all this as it would hang the boot process. Either it's not compatible with OSXS or it was the "wrong channel" effect.

It's been a bit of an adventure but I've learned how to boot cds and hard drives from OF and also that Macs really don't like it if you plug the IDE cables into the wrong ports.

While we're talking about flashing cards, I was able to flash my AHA-2940UW back to the original PC firmware without any hassle. So if anyone was thinking of trying out a PC->Mac conversion, it's reversible.

I'm looking on eBay now and it seems all the cheap and nasty SATA cards are Via-based. The Sil ones are a bit pricier. Do you know any Mac SATA card vendors that use the Via chipset?

 

[MacJunky]

There is one that I have seen that uses a VIA chipset. I have not been able to find any firmware for it though. http://www.macsense.com/product/storage/sua-100e.html

Everything else seems to be SiliconImage or some other brands that cost $$$, and there is one VITESSE VSC-7174.

For bootable cards anyway. Most are OS X only and a couple are OS 9 compatible.

Where I get my PC parts I can pickup a Sil3512 for $15

 

[protocol7]

I kept digging and found a cheap Sil3112 and WiebeTech have a card based on it. Question is, will it boot...

 

[protocol7]

Something else I've been wanting to try is Descent OpenGL with my AppleJack controllers (as it added InputSprocket support along with hardware acceleration). If I can configure it to control the ship with the trackball that would be all kinds of awesome. I can now do that too as there's an ADB port on the back of this G3.

Epic!