OSX & SCSI

[waynestewart]

I have a limited number of SATA and ATA133 cards but I have a fair number of Ultra SCSI PCI cards that I’ve pretty much never used and some 10,000 rpm hard drives. Earlier this week I was waiting around for a repairman and decided to see which Ultra SCSI cards would work in a beige G3 to boot 10.2. I tried these with no luck

Adaptec AHA-2940U2B

Adaptec AHA-2940UWPI

ATTO ExpressPCI UL3S

ATTO ExpressPCI-DC

ATTO ExpressPCI-PSC

Initio A100U2W

Initio 9100UW

Jackhammer SE

All the Adaptec and ATTO cards would work under 10.2, just not for booting OSX. The Initio and Jackhammer cards wouldn’t work at all under 10.2.

A regular SCSI card, the Adaptec 2930 did work for booting OSX though. They all worked for booting OS9

I also had some Grappler 902F cards. They weren’t Ultra SCSI but were bootable under OS9 but not useable under OSX

Has anyone had success booting any version of OSX off a SCSI card other than the Adaptec 2930?

 

[johnklos]

The SCSI card which came with certain beige G3s was just a rebranded ATTO. If you could get one of them or can get the firmware from one onto whichever of the ATTO cards you have is closest, that might work.

 

[waynestewart]

Mine were all salvaged from Macs that a local Mac store thought weren't worth the shelf space in around 2003. I never bought any of them. Some of the Adaptec 2940 and 2930 were definitely Apple cards, probably some of the ATTO ones were too. I'll look them over when i get home

 

[604ev]

ATTO UL3S/D, Express PCI-PSC/DC will boot OSX 10.2, 10.3, 10.4 with ATTO firmware 1.66. I'm almost sure that they might also boot 10.5 on G4s although I never tried (I saw UL4 cards with ROM 1.66 on Leopard MDDs)

So any of your ATTO cards should work with 1.66 and will be configurable via ATTO utility.

If the ATTO ExpressPCI-PSC has the Apple Rom and has not yet been upgraded via Apple-SCSI-Card update, it MUST be patched to use the ATTO Firmware instead. (you'll have to Resedit the patcher application). Otherwise I think it won't be able to boot anything newer than 10.2.

Adaptec might work too with a firmware update, at least for 10.2...

Also, in beige G3s/PowerMacs PCI, these cards should be in the first PCI slot (A1).

 

[NJRoadfan]

I recall reading those ATTO cards could be updated on PCs to the latest firmware (the vendor ID check was only on the MacOS updater) and that they included both Int 13h and Open Firmware ROMs on them.

https://web.archive.org/web/20050205084930/http://os9forever.com/SCSICard.html

 

[waynestewart]

Thanks. This is starting to look promising!

 

[Unknown_K]

Did anyone make mac PCIE SCSI cards for the last generation G5?

 

[604ev]

ATTO UL5S/D

 

[register]

If an SCSI drive works with Mac OS 9.2 and not with 10.2, xpostfacto could do the trick. With 9.2 as a helper disk on the internal IDE (consider to use a small flash drive) any drive that mounts under 9.2 should do as a 10.2 boot drive. I tried this successfully with 10.2 on an externally attached FireWire hard disk drive.

 

[NJRoadfan]

It could be that OS X doesn't have a driver (kext) for the card. Can drives attached to the non-booting SCSI PCI card be mounted and accessed in OS X if you boot off of a supported controller in the same machine?

XPostFacto's boot support using a "kickstart" drive only works if the controller has an OS X driver. In the case of Firewire its the generic OHCI driver. Its mostly to get around the lack of ROM booting support for Firewire/USB in pre-New World machines, not the lack of drivers. The kickstart drive just loads the kernel and enough drivers to get the system running and transfers control to the unsupported boot drive afterwards.

 

[register]

Thank you for pointing out those details regarding ROM booting support vs. SCSI driver support in combination with XPostFacto. However, I found the SCSI support in 10.2 to be mediocre to non existent. Drives might mount but I never managed to use any of my SCSI scanners with 10.2 on a beige G3. The software VueScan does not even notice any scanner connected to the Mac, although it works fine in the same setup with 9.2.2. Btw: I never accomplished to get anything SCSI to work with PowerBook G4 using a PC-SCSI-card.

 

[604ev]

I found the SCSI support in 10.2 to be mediocre to non existent. Drives might mount but I never managed to use any of my SCSI scanners with 10.2 on a beige G3. The software VueScan does not even notice any scanner connected to the Mac, although it works fine in the same setup with 9.2.2. Btw: I never accomplished to get anything SCSI to work with PowerBook G4 using a PC-SCSI-card.

Buddy,

Disk Drives work, as well as tape drives, optical drives, jazz drives, zip drives, supported scanners and raid devices.

BTW: what PC-SCSI card do you use?

 

[CelGen]

Did anyone make mac PCIE SCSI cards for the last generation G5?

I know Adaptec sold PCI-Express SCSI cards but I've never been able to find one cheap enough to test.

OS X sure as hell doesn't like FC cards though.

 

[flecom]

I know Adaptec sold PCI-Express SCSI cards but I've never been able to find one cheap enough to test.

OS X sure as hell doesn't like FC cards though.

at my last job we had tons of macs running OSX on a FC SAN using xSAN just fine

 

[CelGen]

All the qlogic cards I've fed my G5 it didn't like.

 

[flecom]

I have a LSI7202XP in my xServe G5 running OSX Server 10.5.8 attached to some xServe RAID arrays without issue via a QLogic 2GB FC switch

we had tons of LSI7202EP cards but the fans would burn out, and some LSI7204EP cards that were pretty good also (4GB FC on those)