firewire & usb cards not working in beige g3

[refinery]

all of the cards I currently have are two notch cards.
i went ahead and ordered a single-notch 5V card off ebay today, $10 shipped, not bad at all.
I'll report back in this thread when its arrived and tested.

Thanks for the help everyone, much appreciated. Hopefully this does the trick.

[refinery]

sadly the 5V card didnt work either. Same as the others, it shows up under the PCI slot as a firewire and usb card, but the firewire doesnt work properly.
im going to see if i can track down a copy of the FWB toolkit mentioned above.
also going to see about doing a fresh OS install in case its a problem or conflict somewhere w extensions.
also going to see about installing OSX on it, which would help eliminate a software conflict if the same behavior is present in OSX.

[GaryN]

…going to see about doing a fresh OS install in case its a problem

Logically, that is the exact place you're at now. There's no good reason this isn't working so it's time to shotgun the OS

also going to see about installing OSX on it, which would help eliminate a software conflict if the same behavior is present in OSX.

Actually, no it won't. If it doesn't work with OSX, your computer's haunted. If it does work in OSX, you'll be right back at the previous idea: shotgun OS9. You may as well just do that first.

[refinery]

definitely looking like the computer is haunted... clean install of OS9.2.1 to the drive, no change. same behavior as before. I installed OSX 10.2, and it didnt even see the USB devices as being present... despite the fact I was using them at that particular moment. I dont know if that's particular to a beige with OSX though, as I recall back in the day there was a lot of stuff from the legacy machines that didnt work quite right. like my titanium 1ghz would show 64MB VRAM under OS9 but only 32MB under OSX.

also fury de bongo suggested the HDST suite which i installed but made no difference.

but right now i think my only remaining recourse is a mobo swap. just waiting for the right auction to come up on ebay as if im going to spend money on this I wanna have one of the turbo pro pci versions.

[FdB]

Primarily in reference to refinery’s quest.

Can’t locate exact PCI voltage requirements for a G3 400* MHz MiniTower. (*As noted in your profile “Signature” line.) Is that the spec for your machine? (Overclocked?) Anyway…

Resurrected the Beige G3 9600/300 here yesterday and it has the AFW-2100/DELL RoHS dual Firewire 400 card (Dell Adaptec-2100 / Agere chipset) inside. It’s a two-notch card and works well with no extraneous (or extra) Adaptec drivers / enablers present. In this case, running OS 9.2.2… the 9600 does have FireWire Enabler 2.85 and FireWire Support 2.8.5 present and enabled. Someone here previously mentioned the 2.8.7 versions of both these. Maybe… try a “fall back” to these versions or maybe even try the Dell Adaptec-2100 card?

If you’d like to try this card, cover postage both ways and I’ll lend it to you to test. That is… unless someone is absolutely certain that your machine must have a one-notch card. PM me your address if you’d like to try this one. And this card occupies the very last (bottom) PCI slot in this 9600 (also built in 1997).

Other FW 400 cards tested today:

LSI processor (no name) one-notch - powers up and mounts FW400 drive / Unknown chipset - LSI?
Keyspan FPCI-3 one notch - powers up / no mount / TI chipset
Radius Firewire PCI 2330 two notch -  zip, zero, nada… nothing / TI chipset
Adaptec FW-USB Combo two notch - powers up and mounts FW - Provides USB power / TI chipset

After testing the Adaptec Combo, tested other USB cards. None of which recognized either an Apple A1152 or M4848 mouse (with or without USB Overdrive enabled). Nor were any thumb drives successfully mounted or recognized. The A1152 mouse "lit up" but did not “function”. I didn’t really investigate any further or try installing any other drivers or mount approaches. All two-notch cards.

Belkin 4-port - Lucent chip
AUA-2000B 2-port - NEC chip
Generic USB 2.0 Host Card 4 port - V/A chip

Generic USB 2.0 card didn’t work in a G3? No real surprise there…
whereas the Adaptec Combo with the (normally more Mac-friendly) TI chip
did surprise me... because it wasn’t so “friendly” when previously tested in an MDD.

So refinery, if you want to try the "Dell Adaptec-2100" or the LSI... just LMK.