Can't boot OS 9.1 from SATA drive using PCI to SATA card

[dummptyhummpty]

I have a PowerMac 9600 with a Newer Tech G3 upgrade (the logic board is questionable, but it's stable for now).

I recently installed a SeriTek/1S2 clone PCI SATA card and have connected an older non-SSD 500GB Seagate SATA drive. OS 9.1 has no problem reading and writing to the drive and I was able to install a clean copy of OS 9.1. However I'm having trouble booting from it.

The Happy Mac does show up, but it seems to show up a little later than unusual and then briefly get a darker gray screen before the system reboots. It almost looks like it's going to show a Sad Mac, but doesn't. Once it reboots, it shows the floppy disk question icon, but then boots from the internal SCSI drive. Browsing the SATA drive, the System Folder seems to lose it's blessing (no longer shows the correct Icon). I'm not sure if that's related, but fixing that has no effect.

I've tried searching on this issue, but couldn't find much. My only thought could be an incompatible SATA drive, but I wanted to see if there was something I'm missing. Thank you!

[chikorita157]

I think it might be the PCI SATA card as the Firmtek Seritek PCI card should boot into Mac OS 9 or even earlier. The clone one might not have the full firmware to boot into Mac OS 9.

There is an alternative SATA PCI card you can try, which is recommended by someone on 68kmla. I recently bought a AEC-6290M, which is a Mac compatible PCI SATA card that works with Mac OS 9. I have one that I plan to put in my PowerMac G4 MDD that I tested on my PowerMac G3 B&W and it works perfectly with my Samsung and Crucial SSDs with Mac OS 9, Mac OS X 10.2 and 10.4 installed. It shows up as a Parallel SCSI device. Of course, they aren’t cheap as they are discontinued and some online stores may have them for a little over $100. Still, they are probably cheaper than a SCSI2SD.

[dummptyhummpty]

I ended up getting this to work! Either it was a bad logic board or the fact that the drive was ~500GB. I created a 4GB partition and it worked (after swapping the logic board).

[IIO]

The clone one might not have the full firmware to boot into Mac OS 9.

this.

[cyberluke]

I have generic Sil3114 card here. So the only issue is missing support in the firmware. I guess someone in US or EU will solve it after SeriTek sell out :-). I have EEPROM programmer here. If someone could read and upload the firmware from SeriTek card, I could try to write it. That is something similar the Chinese guy is doing, but maybe he used wrong size EEPROM.

EDIT: FirmTek Seritek card is discontinued now and both drivers and firmware is on their website. I guess the clone guy did not even upload the firmware, this card works without drivers out of the box because of SiliconImage chipset. Flashing the firmware could provide this support.

[smilesdavis]

pls someone make this avail

[refinery]

I thought old world macs had a limitation of 8GB for the boot volume. Anything else had to be on a second partition.

[Knezzen]

190GB is the maximum size of a boot volume for anything pre-OSX. Any other limitation is hardware related.
Booting my PowerMac 8600 from a 60GB SATA SSD connected to a SATA PCI card without any issues.

You will run into the same issue if you try to boot 9.2.2 on a more modern machine from a volume larger than 190GB.