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Hmm, sorry then - it must be some conflict with the Quicksilver logic board then - I can't think of what else it could be.
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Guide to flashing PC SIL3112 SATA cards for Mac
- Thread starter harrymatic
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Hmm, sorry then - it must be some conflict with the Quicksilver logic board then - I can't think of what else it could be.
I actually found a configuration that seems to work:
SLOT-1: Graphics card (Nvidia GeForce2 MX)
SLOT-2: SATA Card
SLOT-3: empty
SLOT-4: AirPort Card
SLOT-5: USB 2.0 card
All the PCI cards that I need are there and the Mac boots fine. In other configurations, the Mac behaves strangely.
I'll now test the OS to see if I have kernel panics again. Thanks!
Thanks Harry for all the extra effort. Unfortunately, the new firmware doesn't change my results--chimes, but no video and no boot. I tried the card alone in all four PCI slots. Just an aside--the first PCI slot on the QS has a case nut right next to the PCI screw which makes it very difficult to get PCI cards into that slot, and I like to keep that slot open anyway for better GPU cooling. After no luck with the SATA card, I pulled it out and put my Sonnet ATA133 card back into PCI slot 2 and my Iogear USB2 card back in slot 4, and the QS booted up just fine again. Put the SATA card back in the Dell and flashed it back to the PC bios and the card works just fine back in the Dell. The problem must be compatibility problems with the QS motherboard, or the SATA card, and I'm putting my bets on the SATA card. I'll keep my eye out for an exact match with your card and try again someday and let you know what happens. Or maybe I'll pick up a Firmtek. I'm kicking myself for not putting a bet on a Firmtek card that was on eBay a few weeks ago. It sold for a whopping $7.51.
Works wonderfully in Power mac G4 AGP
I can conferm that this works with my Power mac G4 AGP (rev 3 uni-north ASIC) I borght 2 SATA cards from the OP link and flashed em in a "PC" (if u wanna call a bare mobo on a desk a PC LOL) it went wonderfly and works a treat iv tested em in my PMG 4 with a DVD SATA burner and a 2TB WD green (witch oddly was seen as only 1.8TB hmm) Im just wating for some molex to sata adapters to arive to finelise my SATA setup in the Power mac G4 im upgrading it to the max i also have a 1.4Ghz CPU upgrade in the post witch i paid waaay to much for cant wate for that to arive . all i need now is a core image graphics card (eny one got a ATI radoin 9500-9800 pro? bar 9600 ) I have a screen shot of my PMG 4 atached below
Hope u all like it
I can conferm that this works with my Power mac G4 AGP (rev 3 uni-north ASIC) I borght 2 SATA cards from the OP link and flashed em in a "PC" (if u wanna call a bare mobo on a desk a PC LOL) it went wonderfly and works a treat iv tested em in my PMG 4 with a DVD SATA burner and a 2TB WD green (witch oddly was seen as only 1.8TB hmm) Im just wating for some molex to sata adapters to arive to finelise my SATA setup in the Power mac G4 im upgrading it to the max i also have a 1.4Ghz CPU upgrade in the post witch i paid waaay to much for
cant wate for that to arive . all i need now is a core image graphics card (eny one got a ATI radoin 9500-9800 pro? bar 9600 ) I have a screen shot of my PMG 4 atached below Hope u all like it
Attachments
Glad it's all working for you! I used this guide to flash my own card. I've got two 1TB WD drives running on it. The reason your 2TB drive reports as 1.8TB is because of the difference in formulas for factoring MBs and GBs.I can conferm that this works with my Power mac G4 AGP (rev 3 uni-north ASIC) I borght 2 SATA cards from the OP link and flashed em in a "PC" (if u wanna call a bare mobo on a desk a PC LOL) it went wonderfly and works a treat iv tested em in my PMG 4 with a DVD SATA burner and a 2TB WD green (witch oddly was seen as only 1.8TB hmm) Im just wating for some molex to sata adapters to arive to finelise my SATA setup in the Power mac G4 im upgrading it to the max i also have a 1.4Ghz CPU upgrade in the post witch i paid waaay to much for
Hope u all like it
Drive manufacturers use the PC standard of 1000bytes to a MB and 1000MBs to a GB. Apple has always used 1024bytes to a MB and 1024MB to a GB. Add in a small amount for low level formatting and the system will report less than what the drive capacity states.
As to a a video card, there is a vendor on Amazon that is selling G4 compatible ATI Radeon 9800 Pros. Just do a search there. Be warned that the 9800 draws a signifigant amount of power. Because of all the upgrades in my own Mac I'm looking at an ATX PSU conversion.
My G4 Quicksilver is running a dual 1.6Ghz Giga Designs processor card. It's capable of 2.0Ghz, but I've never been able to get it past 1.73Ghz without issues. I'm stuck at 1.6 right now because the power draw is causing kernel panics during boot.
Right now I'm running a 9800 Pro and a flashed ATI Radeon 7000. That's driving four monitors, one of which is a 20" Cinema Display I have connected to a Apple A1006 DVI/ADC converter (courtesy of a member here). I need two more as I have two 17" Studio Displays waiting. I have another card I've been trying to get flashed and once I get all the power issues sorted all I'll try and get that done. The ultimate goal is six displays. I also have a USB 2.0 card, also courtesy of another member.
Flashing the SATA card though was the catalyst for everything else. Once I did that, parts started coming in and it's been getting incrementally upgraded.
LightBulbFun,
Glad you got them working - nice system you're putting together! It's a shame you're limited to a 2X AGP video card, but the Radeon 9800 Pro would fit the bill nicely - it's a very easy flash as well.
Glad you got them working - nice system you're putting together! It's a shame you're limited to a 2X AGP video card, but the Radeon 9800 Pro would fit the bill nicely - it's a very easy flash as well.
Thanks for the cool responces guys @eyoungren Iv been reading up about ur QS monster its Realy cool whats its geek bench score? im hoping on doing the same with my Power mac G4 sadly i cant do dual CPUs due to the rev 3 ASIC But im shure the 1.4Ghz singal i ordered will work wonders as currently with the stock 450Mhz G4 and 9200 it struggles in leapord (i got the 9200 my self the seller sed it seported core image i should of done my resherech frist ) atleast with nothing open i can watch a 360P Yt vid in mac tubes i got all the PCI slots filled 2 SATA cards and a 5 (one inturnlel) USB card that works in OS 9 and bootble USB drives boot from it eny way Hope im not going too off topic hear or hi jacking a thread regarding the 9800 pro i had a looky on US amazon and they are waay out my bugget i blew that on the SATA cards and proc upgrade and theres nothing on ebay from what i can see I might start my own thread in the PPC forums about my PMG 4 heh
@eyoungren Iv been reading up about ur QS monster its Realy cool whats its geek bench score? im hoping on doing the same with my Power mac G4 sadly i cant do dual CPUs due to the rev 3 ASIC But im shure the 1.4Ghz singal i ordered will work wonders as currently with the stock 450Mhz G4 and 9200 it struggles in leapord (i got the 9200 my self the seller sed it seported core image i should of done my resherech frist ) atleast with nothing open i can watch a 360P Yt vid in mac tubes i got all the PCI slots filled 2 SATA cards and a 5 (one inturnlel) USB card that works in OS 9 and bootble USB drives boot from it eny way Hope im not going too off topic hear or hi jacking a thread regarding the 9800 pro i had a looky on US amazon and they are waay out my bugget i blew that on the SATA cards and proc upgrade and theres nothing on ebay from what i can see I might start my own thread in the PPC forums about my PMG 4 heh
That's a bummer that you can't get duals, but yeah, 1.4 is serious business for that older G4. Enjoy the speed increase!Thanks for the cool responces guys
Geekbench: Check here. Note that this is not current. Because of my issues it's been a fight to keep my QS stable for more than six hours or so. I removed two drives the other day that I had put in a RAID. I don't know if it was the RAID that the Mac didn't like or is because I removed two drives the power situation has abated somewhat (still a mother to get it to boot from a cold start). However, it's been running with no issues for the last day or so. I leave my Macs on, if you can tell. Anyway, if there's no more crashing issues I'll probably try this weekend.
I was actually able to complete a DiskWarrior rebuild of my drive directory though, the other day. It had been freezing at the start screen. So, that leads me to believe that the RAID was problematic. Who knows, it seems to be stable now and that's all I care about.
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10.3.9 panther works
@eyoungren Nice geek bench score I rember try to see if i could get a raid setup on the Power mac G4 couldent get it too boot but wasent bothered it was just a time killer thing Also hopfely in a few days i will be able to buy a flashed Radoin 9800 i found on eBay .
I can conferm that the flashed SATA cards work and boot OS X 10.3-10.3.9 (screen shot atached) I decided to put OS X panther on a SATA drive just for kicks and it works well I used a 160GB WD blue drive i pulled out of my imac when i put a 2TB WD green in then the imac died one thing i notised is all mac OSes iv tried see the drives as ATA drives for some resoin? (also panther took the screen shot as a PDF for some resoin as well?)
@eyoungren Nice geek bench score
I rember try to see if i could get a raid setup on the Power mac G4 couldent get it too boot but wasent bothered it was just a time killer thing Also hopfely in a few days i will be able to buy a flashed Radoin 9800 i found on eBay .I can conferm that the flashed SATA cards work and boot OS X 10.3-10.3.9 (screen shot atached) I decided to put OS X panther on a SATA drive just for kicks
and it works well I used a 160GB WD blue drive i pulled out of my imac when i put a 2TB WD green in then the imac died one thing i notised is all mac OSes iv tried see the drives as ATA drives for some resoin? (also panther took the screen shot as a PDF for some resoin as well?)
The RAID drives I mentioned were empty. They were both IDE (PATA) drives in the standard bay. I don't use them to boot (I boot off my SATA drive) so removing both the RAID and the drives had no negative effect. I have only one other PATA drive connected and that's in the slot where the ZIP drive would be. Just storage. My other drives are FW or USB2.@eyoungren Nice geek bench score
I can conferm that the flashed SATA cards work and boot OS X 10.3-10.3.9 (screen shot atached) I decided to put OS X panther on a SATA drive just for kicks
Your settings for your screenshot are probably set to PDF. You can use Onyx to change the screenshot format.
The drives are seen as ATA because that's what they are. PATA and SATA are the same, except for the interface.
Do you know if the 6 SATA port SIL3112 cards are flashable? They have 3 sil3112 chips.
If I had to bet I would say it probably wouldn't work as there is most likely extra/different code required in the firmware to get all 3 controllers working together. That said, I really can't say for certain as to my knowledge nobody has yet tried this.
Hello!
I flashed a cheap SIL3112 card from ebay using the file in the original post and booting a PC from a flash drive using FreeDOS, I made the boot disk using http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ and then copy the flashing file to the same flash drive.
The flashing went without problems and I can see and access the sata drive in mac os x 10.4.11. But the problem is this: when I boot form a mac os 10.4.3 install dvd the installer won't let install it on the sata drive, it shows a stop sign and says something about it can not boot from that drive or something like that. Has this happened to someone else? I there a solution?
I flashed a cheap SIL3112 card from ebay using the file in the original post and booting a PC from a flash drive using FreeDOS, I made the boot disk using http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ and then copy the flashing file to the same flash drive.
The flashing went without problems and I can see and access the sata drive in mac os x 10.4.11. But the problem is this: when I boot form a mac os 10.4.3 install dvd the installer won't let install it on the sata drive, it shows a stop sign and says something about it can not boot from that drive or something like that. Has this happened to someone else? I there a solution?
I don't now yet because I can't install 10.4.3 and then do the upgrade. I just have a 10.4.3 DVD. Currently the mac is booting from the IDE drive.
I'm not sure what the problem is for you, but I can confirm that I was able to install 10.4.6 from the DVD without any problems. You could just install 10.4.3 to your IDE drive and clone the installation over to a correctly formatted SATA drive, once you update it to 10.4.11.
I have this card in my MDD and SATA boots fine. However if I put this into TDM, it will shut off as I don't have any IDE HDDs plugged in. Just a side note
Yes I can see it.
Tonight I will try the idea of cloning the IDE drive using carbon copy cloner and the boot from the SATA
If you can see it, try going to System Preferences > Startup Disk (under "System") and selecting it.
It boots!!! finally last night I reformat the sata drive and used carbon copy cloner to copy the ide to the sata drive and then selected the startup disk and it booted without problems.
Here I post some test using Xbench on disk access speed
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.4.11 (8S165)
Physical RAM 640 MB
Model PowerMac3,1
Processor PowerPC G4 @ 450 MHz
Version 7400 (Max) v2.9
L1 Cache 32K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache 1024K @ 225 MHz
Bus Frequency 100 MHz
Video Card ATY,Rage128Pro
IDE DRIVE
Drive Type HTS541040G9AT00
Disk Test 29.91
Sequential 34.82
Uncached Write 17.80 -- 10.93 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 60.07 -- 33.99 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 37.64 -- 11.02 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 64.60 -- 32.47 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 26.22
Uncached Write 9.20 -- 0.97 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 62.73 -- 20.08 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 63.01 -- 0.45 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 83.23 -- 15.44 MB/sec [256K blocks]
SATA DRIVE
Drive Type ST3500630NS Q
Disk Test 47.80
Sequential 71.99
Uncached Write 75.27 -- 46.22 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 100.48 -- 56.85 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 44.04 -- 12.89 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 103.96 -- 52.25 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 35.77
Uncached Write 11.89 -- 1.26 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 113.09 -- 36.20 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 91.76 -- 0.65 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 125.37 -- 23.26 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Here I post some test using Xbench on disk access speed
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.4.11 (8S165)
Physical RAM 640 MB
Model PowerMac3,1
Processor PowerPC G4 @ 450 MHz
Version 7400 (Max) v2.9
L1 Cache 32K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache 1024K @ 225 MHz
Bus Frequency 100 MHz
Video Card ATY,Rage128Pro
IDE DRIVE
Drive Type HTS541040G9AT00
Disk Test 29.91
Sequential 34.82
Uncached Write 17.80 -- 10.93 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 60.07 -- 33.99 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 37.64 -- 11.02 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 64.60 -- 32.47 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 26.22
Uncached Write 9.20 -- 0.97 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 62.73 -- 20.08 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 63.01 -- 0.45 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 83.23 -- 15.44 MB/sec [256K blocks]
SATA DRIVE
Drive Type ST3500630NS Q
Disk Test 47.80
Sequential 71.99
Uncached Write 75.27 -- 46.22 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 100.48 -- 56.85 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 44.04 -- 12.89 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 103.96 -- 52.25 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 35.77
Uncached Write 11.89 -- 1.26 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 113.09 -- 36.20 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 91.76 -- 0.65 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 125.37 -- 23.26 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Bit of a newb question but, from what I can see online I've noticed that 2 sata ports will use SIL3112 chip, 4 sata ports will use SIL3114 chip?
Does that mean we are limited to 2 sata port cards?
If I wanted 4 sata drives, I'd have to purchase 2 of these cards right?
Does that mean we are limited to 2 sata port cards?
If I wanted 4 sata drives, I'd have to purchase 2 of these cards right?
That's right, unfortunately there is no Mac ROM for the 4 port versions, meaning that you would have to use 2 SIL3112 cards.
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Glad you got it working, going by the results it's made a definite improvement over the onboard IDE controller!
Thanks for the confirmation! Any theoretical reason why 2 cards wouldn't work in the MDD?
From the sounds of it by 'mikiotty', the order of the cards may have an effect? or is that just a one-off?
Just one other question:
Earlier in the thread, there was someone who had mentioned something about the EEPROM number; where is that found? Is this something I need to be worried about when ordering from sellers on ebay? or does the EEPROM number not matter? I was eyeing this item.
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You'll be fine running 2 cards in an MDD, they have no compatibility problems.
As for the EEPROM, all of these sellers are selling essentially the same card. Every card I have ever come across uses a 128K ROM chip - this almost certainly does as well. In the exceptionally rare event that it's using a 64K EEPROM though, I can put together a smaller ROM image for you.
As the seller has explicitly mentioned that the card uses a SIL3112 controller, that card will work fine.