Mac OS 9 Lives
Mac OS 9 Discussion => Hardware => Topic started by: efunc on April 21, 2026, 09:59:22 AM
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Hi all,
I'm hoping someone might have some experience of ATA/SATA adapters.
I have 2 WD Caviar Blue 500GB Ultra ATA-100 drives installed (and a Seagate UltraSCSI attached to ATTO UL3D card, but isn't showing up on the desktop). I haven't used it for a while because I mostly use my PPC 9600/350, but I booted up yesterday and worked on it the whole day. All. seems well. I was in OSX 10.4 which was installed on both drives and it also had a MacOS 9.2.2 on both too. I set the startup system to one of the MacOS 9 installs and restarted, but after loading the ROM it couldn't find it and just hung on the flashing '?'. The problem is when I now try to reboot into startup manager the system picker doesn't see the OSX systems at all and just shows me the two OS9 systems, but fails to boot into either of them. This is after zapping PRAM and forcing 'x' at startup.
Anyway, I quitting any more troubleshooting and I'm going to order new 500GB drives and start again. IDE drives seem to be expensive new, or beaten-up if used! Are there any performance or reliability issues with using SATA drives with a suitable adapter cable? I can't afford to give up another PCI slot, so if this is basically invisible to the motherboard I'm happy to try the adapter. Failing that, I'm going to have to pay way over the odds for new IDE drives, which seems a bit daft. Anyone tried them in this config?
Thanks!