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Internal floppy drive on iMac G3 - Firmware downgrade

Intresting, will try that later, just trying to get my macbook to mount this fricking drive....

EDIT:

It is indeed disabled in the mac os rom, been playing with the mac os 8.1 HDD, if i use mac os rom 1.2, the drive dosen't work, if i use mac os rom 1.1.2, it works just fine.

just a pity 8.6 won't boot with 1.1.2

 
And a update, i have got the drive working in mac os 8.6 ;)

Using mac os rom 1.1.5 (rather than 1.1.2) did the trick

 
Very nice work! Are there any other public "Mac OS ROM" releases between 1.1.5 and 1.2? We could extract the ROM image from the file and try to find the difference between the last working version and the first nonworking version.

Edit: Looks like that's a negatory.

 
yep, seems 1.1.5 is the latest,

however i would like to try 1.2.1, since the 1.2 i used was from the Powermac G3 install disc, so may well be the reason the floppy isn't working in that version

And uniserver, did you try this yet? and if so did it work?

 
I'm guessing 1.2.1 won't work, but it's just a guess. 1.2.1 is from iMac Update 1.1, which was also released at the same time as iMac Firmware Update 1.0. I bet that's why people blamed the firmware update for disabling the floppy drive.

 
would make sense, i also wonder if people where just mixing up "iMac Firmware Update" and "iMac Update" because i must say, i initially thought the iMac update 1.1 was a firmware update.

Anyway, i'm pretty happy with the box booting 8.6, just got to finish off building it now ;) just needs a floppy drive and hdd ordered for it...

 
Thanks ;)

If you want to see the build process head over to macintosh garden and i have a thread over there on it, this is the second time i have done this mod, this time i'm trying to make the box a bit neater and with more features ;)

Think i might mount up the floppy drive tommrow, will have to order my 8600 a new FDD and cable...

 
Very cool project max1zzz! I'll be watching that thread too.

I know you're satisfied with 8.6, but this whole mystery of the floppy support piqued my interest. I did some more digging and I think I see what happened. I decompressed several versions of the Mac OS ROM file (thanks to the SheepShaver source code)--1.1.2, 1.1.5, and 1.2. Starting with version 1.2, they removed the .Sony and .MFMFloppy DRVRs from the Mac OS ROM file. I still see their names referenced in places, but the actual DRVRs are no longer there. It didn't affect earlier machines with floppy drives because they use their built-in ROM which still has the floppy drivers, but it definitely affected the iMac.

It does kind of raise the question...would it be possible to bring support back to newer Mac OS versions by adding an extension that installs the .Sony and .MFMFloppy DRVRs on New World machines? The other possibility might be to patch the very newest Mac OS ROM file to include those drivers. Unfortunately, I am not well-versed in classic Mac driver voodoo, but I have to believe it's possible.

 
Yeah, would deffo be interesting to see if a way could be found to enable it on mac os 9, but i'm not sure how you would go about it. I would think trying to add them back to, say Mac os rom 3.0 (which came with 9.0) would be the best place to start

 
Well, I extracted the .Sony and .MFMFloppy drivers out of the Mac OS ROM file version 1.1.5. I'm pretty sure they're complete anyway...can't 100% guarantee it because I don't totally know how to parse the ROM resource list. Anyway, interestingly enough they appear to be written with 68k code rather than PowerPC.

I guess at some point we could try to figure out how to load drivers and see if loading them would re-enable the floppy drive in a newer OS version. Could probably be done from an extension or something rather than patching the Mac OS ROM file. It could also fail miserably though :-) If you're ever interested in trying it, let me know and I can try to figure out how to manually load the drivers from an extension.

 
yeah, i would definatley be interested in trying to get the FDD working under os9, probably gonna stick 2 20gb hdd's in the box (or maybe 2 16gb cf cards) so i have pleanty of experimenting space ;)

 
Unless the iMacs have a similar floppy driver at the Open Firmware level, I doubt they ever were able to boot from that internal floppy port. The floppy driver that I have found is in the Mac OS ROM file, which would only be loaded from an existing boot drive. So there's no real advantage to putting it in Mac OS ROM as opposed to an extension--at least that's my working assumption.

I dunno if it's even possible to fit a system small enough on one anyway :)

 
if you wanted to do something like this in a xbox case they can be picked up damn cheap, i won one on ebay for £4.50 once (RRoD Console, so entire caseing, metal cage, and the scrap logicboard)

Out of intrest, did anyone else try this? still a little unsure if the firmware "updater" did anything, or weather no one ever thought of trying a older os / mac os rom before

 
Although nobody else has chimed in yet, I'm 99.9% sure that the Mac OS ROM file is the culprit considering that several drivers are removed from it in the newer versions that don't work.

And now that I think about it some more, the floppy drive never would have been bootable -- because the Mac OS ROM file is too big to fit on a floppy!

max1zzz: if it isn't too much trouble, it would be useful if you could list the drivers when you're in 8.6 with the older Mac OS ROM that has your floppy drive enabled.

To do that: Download MacRelix, open it up, and in the command prompt type "drvr" (without the quotes). Then hit return, and it should give you a list of drivers. It would be very useful to get the list that it spits out. I'd particularly be interested in knowing if .Sony and .MFMFloppy are in the list. Then, if you did the same thing with a newer Mac OS ROM file that doesn't have the floppy enabled we could confirm whether something's missing from that list.

I'm suspecting .MFMFloppy is going to be present with the older Mac OS ROM and missing with the newer...and making an extension that contains and loads it may be all that's needed. Maybe.

 
will do tomorrow, presumably that will be the case

I did see some claims it was bootable, and i somhow managed to get the imac to seem to try to boot from the FDD (floppy icon on screen and it didn't boot from the hdd) no idea how i got it to do that. but of coarse you couldn't get os 8 on a floppy anyway.

 
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