Disk Speed Upgrades (aka The Bootable PCI SATA & SSD thread)

[eastone]

There's also another firmware for sil3512 but there is a  problem how to extract it from the archive...
https://www.siig.com/pub/media/files/drivers/0005/siig3512101updriver1.sit

[redstudio]

let me understand well. does the flasher linked by dosdude1 make pci sata 3112 work on powermac? also os9? no modifications to the board are needed? this would be great! let me know, thanks

[dosdude1]

let me understand well. does the flasher linked by dosdude1 make pci sata 3112 work on powermac? also os9? no modifications to the board are needed? this would be great! let me know, thanks

That is exactly correct, though do be aware that the flashing tool may not work with the specific EEPROM on your card. In my testing, it worked with most EEPROMs, but not all. If it doesn't work, you can always flash using Flashrom on a PC. Still no card modification/soldering required. Once flashed, card will work and be bootable in both OS X and OS 9 (actually as old as System 7.5).

[redstudio]

unfortunately I don't have a card to test immediately.. I'll get a couple as soon as possible to try them.. if everything works you did a really great job Dosdude1.. you finally made it possible to pay little sata controller as PC users.. thanks a lot for your work!

[chrisNova777]

glad someone picked up the ball and ran with it    i thought SATAMAN was gonna sort this couple years back
i obsessed about this pretty hard back in mid 2010s it was frustating knowing it was possible... technical difficulties always get in the way, its great when the walls that block progress come crashing down, this is great news for alot of reasons

"you get a 1S2, and you get a 1S2!, and you get a 1S2!" -- oprah

just when i found 2 sonnets after a year of search rofl

lol

[dosdude1]

Hi dosdude1.
I found the firmware for SIL3114,
maybe you will be interested to see and try to flash the card.
Perhaps all 4 ports will work.

https://www.siig.com/download/search?keyword=SC-SA4M12

There's also another firmware for sil3512 but there is a  problem how to extract it from the archive...
https://www.siig.com/pub/media/files/drivers/0005/siig3512101updriver1.sit

I was able to successfully extract both ROM images. From my analysis, it appears there are no EEPROM ID checks in the drivers, however I could not test the Sil3512 ROM as I don't have a card with that chipset on hand. Both ROMs will fit no issues onto a 128K EEPROM. These ROMs contain only an OS X driver, so they will not work under OS 9, but are bootable and will work just fine under OS X.

[AtariMan]

Thanks a lot, I'll try it today.

[AtariMan]

I flashed 3114, all 4 ports work and everything is fine.
Dosdude1 You are a genius and a very good engineer!
Of course, in Mac OS 9 there is no boot,
although it sees the disk, but 4 ports in Mac OS X are also good.
Sil3512 has not yet flashed, I'll try later.
Thanks again for your work.
You are a very valuable person for the PPC architecture.

[eastone]

@dosdude1

Thank you very much! You are a great engineer! Btw, could you share the details of extracting the firmware and getting rid of those 20 bytes from the file? I am very curious how you did it

[smilesdavis]

I flashed 3114, all 4 ports work and everything is fine.
Dosdude1 You are a genius and a very good engineer!
Of course, in Mac OS 9 there is no boot,
although it sees the disk, but 4 ports in Mac OS X are also good.
Sil3512 has not yet flashed, I'll try later.
Thanks again for your work.
You are a very valuable person for the PPC architecture.

Thanks for the headsup i almost sold my sonnet

But pop in attach drive boots. Love it

[AtariMan]

I stitched 3512, everything is fine!

[eastone]

I found another updater on my hard drive for siig with sil3512. ReadMe says this is the firmware for cards working under mac os 10.2 and above. The previous firmware was for cards working under mac os 10.1 and above. I don't know if there is any difference between these firmware for systems from 10.2 up.

[dosdude1]

@dosdude1

Thank you very much! You are a great engineer! Btw, could you share the details of extracting the firmware and getting rid of those 20 bytes from the file? I am very curious how you did it

Well, upon initial analysis, I found that the actual firmware image was encoded inside the executable binary of the kext (that comes with the SIIG firmware update package). I put in a little bit of time to see if I could figure out how the encoding was done, but ultimately I decided the easiest method would be to just spoof the properties of the card in Open Firmware to just make the updater think the card installed was the appropriate SIIG card it was looking for. Once I did that, all I had to do was simply run the updater, and it flashed the card no issues (though I had to put a different EEPROM on the card for it to work, as the updater only works with two specific EEPROM types. Yes, I attempted to patch this, but it simply does not have the necessary implementation to flash most EEPROMs). Then I just dumped the card's EEPROM, and there we go, a flashable ROM image!

[smilesdavis]

and does it boot in os9?

[AtariMan]

and does it boot in os9?

Sil3112 Mac OS 9 and OS X bootable. Sil3114 and Sil3512 Mac OS X only.

[eastone]

I decided the easiest method would be to just spoof the properties of the card in Open Firmware to just make the updater think the card installed was the appropriate SIIG card it was looking for.

Thanks for the clarification! It sounds very simple if you know what to do Thanks again for your effort for our ppc community!

[chrisNova777]

so is the new goal to get the 4-port card sil3114's booting OS9???

[Borgmac]

Will continue to work on that and flash my first card.
Then I could have some time available...

I was writing this end of January and I had no idea it would take me more than one month to find a solution!
Let's start first with the disappointments:

• G4 Quicksilver does not boot with either SIL3112 or SIL3114 card. There could be a solution implying voltage, but I have not looked into that direction
• My others G4, AGP and Digital Audio, same problem
• After finding that G3 and G5 are OK with the card, launching flashrom in Linux was returning Error: No supported PCI device found, so I could not flash my card
• I will never be able to use my card as the EEPROM need a 12V signal to write on it, and the 12V is not available on the card, so need an EEPROM programmer or replace the chip...

And now the happy ending:

• I start to be able to play with Linux and understand better how to do what I need
• I have found a Linux distro with a Flashrom version that can recognize my cards
• Found a SIL3114 card that I should be able to flash

I have attached 2 files with the result of the checks that Flashrom is doing on SIL3112 and SIL3114. Just check the first 15 lines and the last 2.
You will see that flashrom is first detecting the SIL chip and then go through a long list of EEPROM to see if he find one on the card.

I will be back soon with some other news..

[Borgmac]

OK, I succeeded to flash the SIL 3114 card with SIL3114CTU and SST39Sf010A by using Linux Lubuntu 16.04 remix v2 on a PowerMac G5. Version of the Flashrom is  v0.9.9-rc1-r1942 on Linux 4.4.0-21-powerpc64-smp (ppc64).
Been able to startup G5 and G3 computers with only one SSD connected to the PCI to SATA card or by selecting it at the startup menu.


Will come back later on with detailed process to install and work with Linux to get to this result using only PowerMac computers.

[joevt]

OK, I succeeded to flash the SIL 3114 card with SIL3114CTU and SST39Sf010A by using Linux Lubuntu 16.04 remix v2 on a PowerMac G5. Version of the Flashrom is  v0.9.9-rc1-r1942 on Linux 4.4.0-21-powerpc64-smp (ppc64).
Been able to startup G5 and G3 computers with only one SSD connected to the PCI to SATA card or by selecting it at the startup menu.
Will come back later on with detailed process to install and work with Linux to get to this result using only PowerMac computers.

I made a version of flashrom that you can compile in Mac OS X 10.4 but I don't have a PCI card to test it with.
 https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/silicon-image-sil3112-flashing-easier-way-using-flashrom.7013/post-475781

If it doesn't work, then output from lspci from Mac OS X might be helpful:
sudo lspci -vvvnnxxx > PowerMac_lspci.txt