Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Powermac G4 Quicksilver SATA Problem

H

HawkEye40

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 8, 2008
70
0
Hi. I have recently bought a Sonnet Tempo Serial ATA (2 port) PCI card for my Powermac. I had a SATA hard drive plugged into a windows machine, so obviously I robbed it out of there and put it to much better use inside my mac. I also have an old IDE hard drive installed, running the latest version of Leopard.

So I plugged in the new SATA hard drive, went into disk utility, formatted it, and within Leopard it works fine. It shows up on desktop, I can xbench it, etc....

However, I want to put OS X onto this hard drive. When I boot my mac with the Leopard DVD, and try to install Leopard, the option for the SATA drive isn't there, and it doesn't show up in disk utility in the Leopard install. Yet when I boot into Leopard (on the IDE hard drive) it shows up fine.

Any help would be much appreciated.
 
No drivers for the Sonnet card on the install DVD? The product page claims you can boot from it so there must be Open Firmware drivers on the card BIOS...
 
Nah the Sonnet card doesn't come with any DVD's, the guy who sold it to me said it just plugs straight in and you're good to go. It's in PCI slot 5, and i've tried unplugging the IDE hard drive but still no luck.
 
bet since the drive came from a windows box, is still has the 'master boot record' and not 'apple partition map' needed to start the PPC.

back into disk utility and click on the drive on the left side and look at the bottom under 'partition scheme' to see what it is. to change it, click the 'partition' tab and then the 'option' button at the bottom and pick 'apple partition map'.

just a guess, but i've had some like this before. best of luck.
 
HI, thanks for your help, but I did make sure it was set to Apple Partition Map when I formatted it to 'Mac OS Extended (Journaled)'. Thanks for your help though, this has really stumped me.
 
well drat. hoping for an easy early morning victory...

the 2 port sonnet is bootable, no software required, so that's not it. any other pci cards in your system?

next for me, i'd try going to barebones, that is only what is required to boot (sata, video, no ide hard drive, no external cables connected, etc) and see if that changes the symptoms.

might also try a different sata cable if you have another around. had one cable that would cause the drive to appear and disappear now and then...
 
Thanks again for your help.

I do have a PCI graphics card, so I took that out, left my AGP graphics card in, and just turned it on with just keyboard / mouse and VGA cable plugged in. Same result unfortunately, so I also tried a different SATA cable, plugged it into the other SATA port on the Sonnet card, and even tried the Sonnet card in a different PCI slot, and still no change.

Looks like I could be snookered here, it's a Western Digital 250GB drive with a 16MB cache if that helps.
 
HawkEye40 said:
HI, thanks for your help, but I did make sure it was set to Apple Partition Map when I formatted it to 'Mac OS Extended (Journaled)'. Thanks for your help though, this has really stumped me.
Click to expand...

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but for Leopard, doesn't the drive have to be set to GUID Partition Table? Or is that what you mean by Apple Partition Map?
 
What setting should I have it on? I think there's no jumper setting at the moment, should there be?
 
HawkEye40 said:
What setting should I have it on? I think there's no jumper setting at the moment, should there be?
Click to expand...

another longshot then, based on looking at the jumper pdf. the sonnet card is 150. is the sata drive a 150 or 300? if it's one of the newer 300's (SATA II), then you might try a jumper on 5-6 (picture 4 in the pdf) to force the drive into 150 mode. don't think it would prevent it from showing up, but i really have no other ideas. hope you find out what it is as i would really also like to know!
 
lol I really want to find out too! The problem I have is that it works fine once in OS X, but it can't be found when I want to install OS X on it. So I dont know if that jumper setting will work. I will try the jumper thing as soon as I can find one though, i'll keep you informed.
 
Since the install DVD has a stripped down version of OS X to boot off of it could very well be that it simply does not have the appropriate drivers to access that card, while previous versions may have had the driver. Once Leopard is installed a more full featured OS is available for booting with a complete driver set thus enabling you to boot off the card or see it on another Volume with Leopard installed.

If you have a SATA DVD drive you could try booting the Leopard installer off of the SATA DVD drive. If you get "Still waiting for root device" I would conclude it is a driver problem. Another way to test the DVD Install disc if you do not have a SATA DVD drive is to install use Superduper and clone your install DVD to your SATA hard drive. Then proceed to try booting off of the SATA install drive. Your hard drive should behave in the same manner as a SATA DVD drive just much quicker boot.

You could use Superduper to clone your IDE hard drive to your SATA one then boot off the SATA drive.
 
velocityg4 said:
Since the install DVD has a stripped down version of OS X to boot off of it could very well be that it simply does not have the appropriate drivers to access that card, while previous versions may have had the driver.
Click to expand...

Not to hijack or anything, but this is one thing about OSX that drives me CRAZY! If I want to install OSX on an external drive, or second internal hard drive, there's no reason I should have to boot to the install disk. I should just be able to install it onto a different drive than the one I'm booted to currently. But, of course, there's no way to do that. Drives me nuts.
 
ok take ide drive out of your mac altogether and run only sata drive.


Insert leopard Install disc and see if that works.

Macs can either boot up off of ata/sata drive or external firewire drivrs only.

--Eric

P.S. Macs can only boot from one or the other.


Click on system preferences--->startup disk and set the drive you want to boot from.
 
Hi guys, thanks for all your help.

I did try unplugging the IDE HD and booting with just the SATA HD, but it couldn't find it. This is what I ended up doing:

Format IDE HD and install a fresh copy of Leopard.
Boot into Leopard from IDE HD.
Use Superduper to copy contents of IDE HD to SATA HD
Boot off SATA HD

And atm, fingers crossed, that works fine. Thanks for the program link velocityg4! Am I going to have any OS problems doing it this way? Seems to be working ok for me so far.

Thanks again for your help.
 
Hi guys,

I got an email back from the Sonnet people:

Apparently this is a quirk of the Leopard installer so I asked my
contact at Firmtek (who makes the card for us) if they've ever seen
this and I got this reply:

> The SeriTek/1S2 is bootable with OS X. For some users the drive does
> not show up when the Leopard CD is inserted. In this case, using
> SuperDuper to clone the current boot drive to the hard drive on the
> SeriTek/1S2 allows the drive to be bootable. I have done this many
> times.

We've tested this workaround and it works every time.
Click to expand...

Just thought i'd let you know. Thanks!
 
HawkEye40 said:
Hi guys, thanks for all your help.

I did try unplugging the IDE HD and booting with just the SATA HD, but it couldn't find it. This is what I ended up doing:

Format IDE HD and install a fresh copy of Leopard.
Boot into Leopard from IDE HD.
Use Superduper to copy contents of IDE HD to SATA HD
Boot off SATA HD

And atm, fingers crossed, that works fine. Thanks for the program link velocityg4! Am I going to have any OS problems doing it this way? Seems to be working ok for me so far.

Thanks again for your help.
Click to expand...
You should not have any problems. Super Duper simply makes a bootable duplicate of another hard drive or partition. Assuming the original was bootable of course;).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back