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[efunc]

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!

[indibil]

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!

I have a SATA SSD with the "Narrow" adapter in almost all my G3/G4 Macs, which uses a JMicron chip. It works flawlessly. It only takes a little while to recognize OS9 on machines that exclusively use Master/Slave, such as a Slot Loading iMac G3 or a Cube.

https://es.aliexpress.com/item/1005007039319777.html?gatewayAdapt=glo2esp

[efunc]

Thank you for the tip.

I'm really mystified by this G4 booting problem. I mean, I had it working for years and was using it last week, and there's always been two 500GB PATA drives installed and MacOS X as well as OS9, no problem.

Now I cannot get it to find any hard drive unless I reformat it as 128GB! This is all since I tried to switch the Startup system to one of the OS9 system installs using the control panel. II've been testing it with my new 500GB drive I bought on eBay. It successfully formatted as 500GB with Disk Utility on startup, when booted off the system CD, but then when trying to install OSX 10.1 from the CD it just hangs. When I reformat it to 128GB then I can finally install the OS just fine. But then when I try to start up with one of my original 500GB drives on the ATA bus as well it fails to find the boot disk and just sits on the blue startup screen. I don't know what changed since it worked without issue in this config before. Disk First Aid finds no problem with the HDs. I've put one of them in an external firewire enclosre and it works fine, perfectly healthy and system files are all intact, so I'm out of ideas here.

The Mac is a 2002 G4 Dual 1GHz Quicksilver.

[IIO]

MacOS9 requires its boot volume to not exceed 192 gb, so you needed to make a partition small enough for that limit.

[efunc]

Thank you. I've made progress on this now and figured out the issue AFAICS.

1 I Booted off system disc, formatted new 500GB HD as 128GB HFS, installed OSX 10.1 and then restarted the G4, Finally get a proper boot up.
2 Then put one of the original 500GB drives in a firewire enclosure and all files are folders are intact and drive looks fine.
3 Ran Disk First Aid and note that it recognises both drives as being 500GB, not 128GB at last.
4 Went into Startup Disk Control Panel and I was greeted with multiple OS options on the firewire drive (original boot drive): 10.3.9, 10.4.1.1 and 9.2.2 are all present.
5 Located the rogue 10.3.9 languishing deep in a legacy folder - back up of another Mac. Deleted it.
6 Return the original drive from the Firewire enclosure back into the G4 and restart with Option key depressed.
7 This time only one System was found - 10.4.11. Boot into it and all's back to how it was Smile

So in conclusion, it seems that the presence of an old 10.3.9 system buried in a folder was confusing startup manager once I switched my boot system away from 10.4.11 to OS9. Also OS9 will need to be reinstalled since it doesn't appear on the boot screen with Option key held down. It does in the Startup Disk Control Panel, but I think that's less effective at checking the integrity of an OS install than the actual boot screen. My OS9 system appears to just be a backup of an old boot drive (from a powrebook Pismo!) so would not have ever worked.

Also, 10.1 (and maybe OS9 too) are not capable of seeing drives larger than 128GB. That functionality maybe arrived later and requires 10.3.9 or 10.4.11.

I will now install OS 9.2.2 again and see if I can boot successfully off that.I will also need to investigate why the SCSI boot disk is not mounting either.

But thank you to all that helped - I learned a few things and the information was instrumental in helping me get this back up and running. Thanks

[IIO]

i didnt read your post carefully enough.

now that you say it, there is a series of the dual 1.0 which actually has that 128 gb limit due to its ATA controller, just as the 733 has. (it is not the OS, the OS handles 2,13 TB)

[joevt]

Regarding disk size in Open Firmware:

Early Power Macs (Beige G3, 6500, TAM) had a LBA detection bug that limits them to CHS.

It is fixed in Open Firmware 3.2.4f1 and later.

It is also fixed in these:
3.1.1f4 B&W G3
3.1.2f2 G4 Yikes

3.1.0f1 PowerBook G3 Lombard has two ATA drivers.
LBA detection is correct for ata-disk package (used for ata-3/disk devices where ata-3 is a heathrow-ata compatible device)  (similar to B&W G3, Yikes)
LBA detection is not correct for pci104c,ac1a (Texas Instruments PCI1210) or pci104c,ac1e (Texas Instruments) PCI1211 CardBus bridges.

These versions have incorrect LBA detection (skipping versions of Open Firmware that are headerless):
2.0a9 Power Express (9700 Prototype)
2.3 Power Express (9700 Prototype)
2.4 Beige G3 rev C
2.4 Beige G3 rev D
3.1.3f2 iMac (233 MHz) Bondi Blue
3.1.3f2 iMac (266,333 MHz)

4.3.2f1 adds 48-bit LBA support.
Earlier LBA is 28-bit (128 GiB) which has the same limit as CHS (actually CHS limit is 127.5 GiB)

heathrow-ata driver exists for Open Firmware 2.x up to 4.9.6f0. An Open Firmware patch could load it from disk to provide LBA48 support for all OHare/Heathrow compatible ATA controllers.

Even though Open Firmware is limited to CHS on Beige G3, Mac OS 9 is able to see all partitions on a disk that is greater than 128 GiB in size (using LBA48). Mac OS X needs a one line change in the HeathrowATA kext (for 10.2.x and later - I know it works for 10.3.x).

Later G4's use KeyLargoATA. The kext supports LBA48 since 10.1.5 (or at least that's when the Extended LBA flag was added).