Acard 6290M Sata PCI controller bios update?

[1042686]

I imagine this is a long shot but does anyone know of a bios update/flash tool for a Acard 6290M pci sata controller? This thing works fine in os9 and up to 10.3 but starting at Tiger drives connected to it show up as Scsi and the thing randomly decides to not work - hoping to flash this card so it plays nice with Tiger/Leopard?

It's currently running bios AEC6290M v2.16.

 

[Raging Dufus]

I had an AEC-6280M (not 6290) back in the day, only ever used it in Tiger but the drives always appeared as SCSI. From what I could search out online, this was normal behavior.

Mine came with a driver disc, so there should be something available to download out there somewhere. Yours is a different model, but perhaps the 6280 driver would work?

EDIT: Never mind, I replied before I saw the pic you posted. I doubt an ATA-133 card's driver would work for SATA.

 

[1042686]

Yeah man no biggie. I've located and stored on my NAS all the needed files for my sil3512's and 3124's but this darn card is a pain in my side as my primary PPC environment is Leopard and this thing goes nutballs the second it sees 10.5. I think I might just sell it as they get good money and certainly an OS9 user out there could benefit from it more than myself.

If there is an updater for it, it would be cool to at least include it on a disk with the card, but I have not been able to find one now or via WBM.

 

[Raging Dufus]

Well...not being inclined to leave well enough alone, I have some more bad suggestions for you.

(although, they're only "bad" because I don't know how to do them myself, I've just seen others write about doing them... and because you've probably already figured these things out on your own, since you can read and already know how to google and stuff... but anyway...)

I see from these NewEgg reviews that others have also had your problem, and that the drivers for the card are supposedly pre-loaded in Panther. Looks like OWC used to sell this card, and their description on that Wayback capture also says the card was "plug & play"... soooooooo........

How about using that Pacifist app to locate and duplicate whatever kexts in Panther support the card; then use some of that black magic like they're doing in that other forum to make Snow Leopard more PPC-friendly, and put the Panther kexts in Tiger/Leopard? Maybe it'll work?

Too much? Yeah me too. I'd probably just put the card on eBay, have a beer and call it a day.

 

[1042686]

I have pacifist loaded on my intel macs for just such sorcery. If it works, I will include it making the card more usable for whoever buys it.

Appreciate you looking into it as deeply as you did. In short, I didn’t have the time to go down that rabbit hole. Glad you did. Interesting idea.

 

[1042686]

Hmm, looks like the most modern driver is 1.5.7. Panther would be using 1.5.1 >> per our assumption, it looks like I will need to fold panther's Acard62kxM.kext file into Leopard for stable functionality … maybe. This is all theoretical as I'm at work ATM but will mess with it this weekend.

edit: If 1.5.1 gets squirrely, I'll try 1.5.7. and if that is a no go, it's moving on as I have little interest in OS9.2.2 ATM.

 

[SnakeCoils]

Looking in my Mac archive I found a firmware/driver update for the 6890m version (which I have), comparing the specs looks like the differences with 6290m are the selectable RAID mode via dip-switches and boot capability from RAID and Non-RAID volumes. Inside the archive there is also a 2.0.6 driver for OSX, for anyone interested it is attached to this post. From time to time I regularly checked the Acard site before the legacy product support disappeared so this is the latest available.

 

[1042686]

This is fantastic. DL’d to my own archive & Thankyou for sharing