quick pci performa scsiboot question

[chelseayr]

just asking in general for now but are these systems normally only booting from the onboard scsi without keyboard interaction or if one was willing to bypass the wiring harness itself then could one had natively boot the sole internal hdd from a fastscsi or ultrascsi pci card instead of via the wiring harness?

(by keyboard interaction I indeed meant as in having to hold down one/few key(s) to make the system boot from 'that' specific media/drive otherwise)

 

[joevt]

Which systems are you referring to? What ROM checksum?

 

[chelseayr]

joevt I was thinking specifically of the 6400 and 6500 in general (if you want to mention about the 6360 too then thats fine as its a pci model after all)

 

[joevt]

The post at https://68kmla.org/bb/threads/refurbished-powermac-6500-acting-up-did-i-do-it.50456/post-570219 says if it finds an IDE drive, it will try to boot from it but if the OS is not a supported version then it will not try SCSI drives.

I don't know if it would look for a SCSI drive on a PCI SCSI controller when there is no IDE drive.

 

[chelseayr]

ah hm I had thoughtfully tried a few keywords but I somehow still managed to miss that particular thread, thanks for that particular link still!

and hmmm might have to think a bit about my 'springtime' project idea then..will see what I say tho..

 

[chelseayr]

I know adaptec was likely thinking of the towers (which obviously are quite different boards in their own rights of course) when they sold their macintosh pci cards but nevertheless it seem like the datasheets for a few different 2900-series all explicitly mention native bootability as far as the 1997 version of adaptec's website on archive.org is suggesting

(of course I should add one exclamation: the 2906 as far as I see seem to be the only number in that series that doesn't support booting, probably has no bios chip in first place)