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Air Cooling a Late 2005 G5 Quad

mac57mac57 said:
Well @joevt, this opens up a can of worms!

I think you are suggesting that if I upgrade to the latest OF version my 4 TB spinner will then be recognized? Since my other Quad had no issues with seeing the spinner, this makes sense... it must be running a later version of OF.

Since I cannot find an OF reference guide however, I need to know how to:

- Query my current OF version

- Find the last OF version for the Late 2005 G5 Quad

- Find a way to flash that new firmware onto my machine

Would you happen to know the answers to any of the above?

Finally, I am worried that if anything goes wrong during flashing, I will "brick" the machine I have just so recently coaxed back to life...

All that having been said, I remember that someone here at MacRumors posted a lengthy set of OF commands (not a full set, just what they could find). I will hunt that down and see if it answers any of my questions above.
Click to expand...
Just hold Command-Option-O-F at startup to get into Open Firmware. It should show the version on the display. Then type mac-boot to continue booting. I think all Quad G5 should have the GPT boot support.
5.2.7f1 BootROM built on 09/30/05 at 15:31:03

The last firmware updater I know about for a different Power Mac G5 was "5.1.8f7 Power Mac G5 (June 2004) Firmware Update".
5.1.8f7 BootROM built on 10/26/04 at 16:30:32

Your problem was that the 4 TB hard drive from the LCS Quad did not appear in the Air Quad. There should be zero reason for that. The Quad has two drive bays. Was the Air Quad setup to have the drives in the same bays as the LCS Quad? Does diskutil list show the disk? Is the SATA cable fully inserted? Is the power cable fully inserted?
 
A little more data:

The OF version is 5.2.7f, which feels like one of the latest/greatest.

The machine recognizes "lesser" disks, for example 750 GB or 500 GB drives, but not the 4 TB spinner, even when it is the ONLY drive present.

Based on these results, I am going to order one new 1 TB spinner and install that. For now, it's "place" is being held by a 500 GB spinner that needs to go back to its original machine, from which it was borrowed for this test.

Meantime, with only one of two CPU cards running, my air cooled "half Quad" runs like a champ... fast, quiet and cool. It is like a 2.5 GHz version of the late 2005 2.3 GHz G5 Dual, my original PO personal Mac and these days, my other main G5.
 
mac57mac57 said:
Thanks @joevt. Are there any release notes that would suggest that this later version might recognize HDDs larger than 2.2 TB?
Click to expand...
I don't recall. I don't think it's a problem with the size. diskutil list doesn't show the disk?
I think I have SATA drives that are not recognized by my Quad G5.

Found these posts:
https://hardforum.com/threads/bootable-ssd-powermac-g5-quad.1852058/post-1041422770
https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/recommendations-for-ssds-for-a-g5.34832
https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/1jw22y2/sdd_doesnt_work_on_power_mac_g5

You can go here to look for drive upgrades compatible with the Quad G5:
https://eshop.macsales.com/upgrades...l-core-late-2005-october-2005/internal-drives
Some options are far greater than 4 TB. I don't know if they've actually tested all those options. But it's not showing SSDs. Maybe they've determined the Quad G5 is not compatible with all SSDs or they don't have any SATA I (1.5 Gbps) SSDs.

You can put the drive into a FireWire or USB enclosure and connect it the Quad G5. FireWire 800 is faster and bootable. Extra work is required to make USB bootable on Quad G5.
https://eshop.macsales.com/search/?...filter.dimension_type_135=Bare Enclosure Only
FireWire is not as fast as SATA I though.

You have PCIe slots so you could connect drives to a PCIe card but they wouldn't be bootable since Open Firmware doesn't have generic AHCI or NVMe drivers and I don't think IDE controllers have a standard?
 
Thanks @joevt. Nope, "diskutil list" does not show the 4TB spinner at all. I replaced it, for the short term, with a 500GB spinner, and that drive is both recognized and bootable. Despite having been recognized by and booted from my "other Quad", the same 4 TB HDD is not even "seen" by the Air Quad.

I have ordered a new 2 TB spinner, which I will slot into the Quad in place of the 500 GB one, and we shall see how this goes.

In every case, the drives in question are Western Digital Blue spinners. I have had great luck with them until this recent issue with the 4 TB one not being recognized by the Quad.
 
I am looking at a new PCIe SATA card for my Quad. The card in question uses the Marvell 88SE9215 SATA chip. Does anyone know if Mac OS X Leopard supports this chip, and if so, can it boot from it? Thanks!
 
mac57mac57 said:
I am looking at a new PCIe SATA card for my Quad. The card in question uses the Marvell 88SE9215 SATA chip. Does anyone know if Mac OS X Leopard supports this chip, and if so, can it boot from it? Thanks!
Click to expand...
It's AHCI so it might work but it won't boot.
Maybe you can start the boot using internal SATA and redirect root to the AHCI drive to finish the boot - like XPostFacto did.
 
Well... this problem (no recognition of a 4 TB spinner) seems to have solved itself, but in an unexpected way.

When I was first testing out what would become my Air Quad, I needed a hard drive to boot the machine from. I wanted a good one, but the 4 TB spinner I had planned on using wasn't recognized by the Quad. So, hunting through my stocks, I came across a 750 GB SATA drive that was originally delivered as one of two such drives with my 2008 Mac Pro. It is a 7200 RPM drive with a respectable 64 MB of on board cache; quite a decent HDD for the day.

So I installed it in the Quad and loaded it up. It has been performing well since.

Years ago, I had upgraded that very same 2008 Mac Pro with two larger disks, both 1 TB spinners. I opened it up, thinking to extract one of the two 1 TB drives and use that drive to test my Air Quad - since it didn't recognize a 4 TB drive, would it recognize a 1 TB drive? However, when I went to pull what I thought was one of the two 1 TB drives out of the Mac Pro, what I got instead was... the other 750 GB drive that had been delivered with the machine... I had left it in when I upgraded (the 2008 Mac Pro has 4 drive slots, so lots of room for extra disks)!

I've always loved symmetry, and then add in the idea of reuniting these two 750s, together again after all these years but now in a different machine, and it was too much for me to resist. I installed it as the second 750GB drive in my Air Quad and both 750s have been performing well, together again, ever since.

It is not just symmetry; it is a "solution" of sorts. It sidesteps the whole "4 TB drive recognition" problem. It doesn't actually solve it, it just shunts it to the side for now. I've solved enough problems associated with this Air Quad; I am OK to "park" this one for the near future.

So, coming back to where I started, this problem has solved itself... for now.
 
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Another "real world" performance/cooling result from my Air Quad. I am running both a Carbon Copy Cloner backup of my boot volume and a network copy of a large DMG from my Mac Studio to the Air Quad. Both CPUs (just two because I have disabled both CPU B cores due to color artifacts on screen that they create when enabled) are running continuously in the 80% to 85% area. CPU temperatures are stable in the 59 C to 63 C range while under this load. This seems a good result to me.
 
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