SATA? In an old world PCI Power Mac?! IMPOSSIBRU! (Updated 11/22/23)

[Trash80toG4]

Thanks! Do any of the ports work, maybe twop of them?

Does anyone have a solution for an OS9 card? Gotta be, there's a vid of a TAM fanatic using SATA.

 

[phipli]

Thanks! Does anyone have a solution for an OS9 card?

If you can find a Sonnet Tempo Serial ATA, that would work great - but they're expensive.

Or something like a Firmtek / Seritek 1S2... but they rarely turn up. Until recently you could actually still get them new.

They're basically the same card and both will boot Classic Mac OS from System 7 and up. Once you get to OS X it tends to depend on the exact version of the firmware and the driver combined with the version of OSX I think.

The cheap option is to get a generic card based on the same Sil3112 chip that those two cards use and flash them to use that firmware. There are a couple of little complications, especially to do with G4s and sleep, and sometimes beige G3s, but you should be fine with your 7600 if that was what I saw you mention.

I haven't read the start of this thread, but given the title, but I'd guess this thread has more detail on this already?

 

[bakkus]

I feel like this thread has come full circle
Yes, the methods outlined in this thread work for OS9 - hell, I've even done OS 7.6!

What kicked off this whole endeavour was the scarcity of the Seritek and the Sonnet cards.
So yes, what's done here is flash off-the-shelf "modern" hardware with modded FW so they work in our beloved old-school macs.
I'm pretty sure this recipe has been successfully done on a TAM as well.
I personally know of 4400, 9600, G3, Sawtooth, MDD - I'm sure there are more.

 

[speakers]

I got a PowerMac 7600. Nice condition but the original hard-drive was deceased; the CDROM was seized; the floppy needed service, and more RAM would be nice. Obviously this was a candidate for the PCI-SATA treatment.
...(strange behavior)...
Explain that. Supply rails iffy on the 7600 and the bad card misreads its eeprom???

It was the eeprom (MX29LV040). It worked fine for a while. Then I pulled it from its socket to try something. On replacement, it became flakey and soon failed completely - it didn't read correctly on my TL866II+ and wouldn't flash. Another eprom (SST39LV040) was fine .. flashing it in situ with dosdude1's fine patched flasher and ROM.

In addition, a new chinese SIL3112 (with AM28F010 replaced with SST29SF010) works fine in the PM7600 also.

 

[phipli]

It was the eeprom (MX29LV040). It worked fine for a while. Then I pulled it from its socket to try something. On replacement, it became flakey and soon failed completely - it didn't read correctly on my TL866II+ and wouldn't flash. Another eprom (SST39LV040) was fine .. flashing it in situ with dosdude1's fine patched flasher and ROM.

In addition, a new chinese SIL3112 (with AM28F010 replaced with SST29SF010) works fine in the PM7600 also.

What EEPROM part was fitted before you did any modifications?

SATA cards use a mixture of 3.3v and 5v EEPROMs depending on the board design, the MX29LV040 is a (nominally) 3.3v part. If your card is feeding it 5v, that might explain why it died.

 

[speakers]

What EEPROM part was fitted before you did any modifications?

SATA cards use a mixture of 3.3v and 5v EEPROMs depending on the board design, the MX29LV040 is a (nominally) 3.3v part. If your card is feeding it 5v, that might explain why it died.

The original part was a 5v 512k prom - I think it was an SST39SF010. I switched the strapping to 3.3v when I installed a socket and the MX29LV040. It had been working fine (on another machine) for a couple of years.

In fact, I checked that the 3.3v supply was good because there's a suggestion that cheap cards may have poor quality regulators.

Notably, I was recently able to re-use that original SST39SF010 in another SIL3112 card thanks to the wondrous compressed-patched ROM.

 

[phipli]

The original part was a 5v 512k prom - I think it was an SST39SF010. I switched the strapping to 3.3v when I installed a socket and the MX29LV040. It had been working fine (on another machine) for a couple of years.

In fact, I checked that the 3.3v supply was good because there's a suggestion that cheap cards may have poor quality regulators.

Notably, I was recently able to re-use that original SST39SF010 in another SIL3112 card thanks to the wondrous compressed-patched ROM.

Was worth checking