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That is promising... would you be kind enough to dump/backup the firmware and share it on here so I can try it on my 4 port Sil3114 card?

Thanks
(instructions for dump firmware are earlier in the thread)

Amedias. are you talking about the directions in post #1 on this thread? I need to find a floppy drive. I could use a USB drive, right?

mraroid
 
Amedias. are you talking about the directions in post #1 on this thread? I need to find a floppy drive. I could use a USB drive, right?

mraroid

You can do it with usb drive, I think instructions are a page or two back from here but I’m on my phone so struggling to search, will reply back once I’ve got the baby to bed!
 
You can do it with usb drive, I think instructions are a page or two back from here but I’m on my phone so struggling to search, will reply back once I’ve got the baby to bed!


Check out the post by Brain-Freeze on Nov 26th 2018, Post # 202. That might be the one you are talking about?
Any chance that I can ruin my card when I do this?

mraroid
 
This morning I booted to my apple branded OS 9.2.1 CD. I was unable to see the SS drive at all. I will experiment some more to see if I can get the card to see OS9. Anyone think that if I had a CD of OS 9.2.2 things would be any different?

It probably won't be different. I think it's a trait of Wiebetech's firmwares (your card probably uses one of them). I have a 2-port card with a Sil3512 chip. I flashed it with the Wiebetech's firmware for Sil3512 and OS 9.2.2 couldn't see the drive connected to it. Every time I want to boot from that drive after using OS 9.2.2, I have to restart with Option key pressed.

AFAIK, the story of flashing a PC SATA card to be bootable for Mac involves firmwares from 2 companies. Wiebetech (now CRU) and Firmtek. And there are at least two ways for flashing it: using Silicon Image's (now Lattice Semiconductor) flasher from a PC or using Wiebetech's flasher from the Mac.

Wiebetech had 2 bootable firmwares, one for Sil3112 and another for Sil3512 (and it seems to work with Sil3114 also). They are OS X bootable only. The file sizes is small enough to be put into stock EEPROM chips in most cards.

Firmtek has several Mac-bootable firmwares but there is just one for Sil3112, for their own FirmTek SeriTek/1S2 card. This firmware is both OS X and OS 9 bootable but the size is too big to fit into EEPROM chips used in most cards. Moreover it only works with 3 models of EEPROM chips: Pm39LV040, MX29LV040, Am29LV040B. You can successfully flash it into any EEPROM chip that's big enough for the firmware but it will not function if the chip is not one of the three.

If you want to flash it from OS X using Wiebetech's flasher. The limitation is it only supports EEPROM chips from four brands: SST, ATMEL, PMC, WINBOND. So that's why this method is not as popular as using other flashers from PC.

I don't have a PC and I wanted an OS 9 bootable card. So I replaced the stock EEPROM chip with a Pm39LV040 (it's a PMC's product), removed R25 and bridged R24 to get 3.3V instead of the original 5V and used the Wiebetech's flasher to flash Firmtek's firmware into the card.

To their credit, I got info (about Firmtek's firmware and the limitation of Wiebetech's flasher) from these threads:
https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/52136-i-just-ruined-my-sata-card/
https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/45375-sil3112-flashing-sata/

PS: when I installed both the Sil3512 card with Wiebetech's firmware and the Sil3112 one with Firmtek's firmware, the Wiebetech's firmware seemed to override Firmtek's. I mean OS 9.2.2 didn't see SATA HDD connected to the card with Firmtek's firmware.
 
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Check out the post by Brain-Freeze on Nov 26th 2018, Post # 202. That might be the one you are talking about?
Any chance that I can ruin my card when I do this?

mraroid

Yes that's the one!

If you only do the read/dump of the firmware then there is very very very little risk to your card, as you're not writing or changing anything, just reading and saving the firmware file. Your card is working in OSX with the 3114 chipset and all four ports, I would very much like this firmware please if you are able to do it!

Flashing, where you write a new firmware, does carry some risk, but it is fairly small. At the moment you have a working (in OS X) card, whether you want to try flashing it to get OS 9 support is up to you, but I've personally only ever managed to ruin one card with a bad firmware write in the last 20 years...
 

That card will not work with MacOS 9. Don't waste your time. You would have realised this if you took the trouble to read the actual listing.

I quote

This is for a new 4 port SATA card for a PowerMac G4. It adds 4 SATA ports to any PowerMac G4 with a PCI slot EXCEPT FOR THE QUICKSILVER AND DIGITAL AUDIO. It should also work in a blue & white G3, and the G5 with PCI.

It uses the Silicon Image Sil3114 chip.

It's fully supported in OSX 10.2 or later. No drivers are needed.

It supports booting from a SATA hard drive or SSD.

It allows you to use (and boot from) drives larger than 137GB even on Macs that don't support 48 bit addressing.

It does not support OS 9.

It will not work in a Quicksilver (and probably also Digital Audio) G4 due to a hardware compatibility issue.

I mean, the seller even put the non-compatibility with MacOS 9 in bold. The issue with Quicksilvers leads me to believe that someone has doctored the Wiebetech firmware for the SiI3112 found in the OP of this thread and managed to get all four ports working, so there is that.
 
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Project - Are you using an ATI 9200? I am getting some OS 9 drivers for that video card in the mail soon. If you like, I can pass on what I receive. While they are the proper drivers, I am unsure if they take advantage of the acceleration of that card. One can only hope......
mraroid
No, I am using a Nvidia Geforce 6200 AGP.
OS 9 should however get full acceleration on a Radeon 9200.
 
Hi,
some of you said that a SIL3512 would work with Wiebe-Firmware. So I bought some cards and loaded them with WiebeSATA3512 Firmware & Flasher but it doesn't work well...



edit: flashing did work now. I switched from leopard to Tiger, flash it there and afterwards booted back to leopard install, in system profiler the card gets listed as Wiebe now, like it should. Thanks for you files @hwojtek



However, I can't see any drives connected to it. Should them show up in DU? Because they dont... There is nothing. All are formated with apple_partition_map and HFS+. What could be the issue?
 
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However, I can't see any drives connected to it. Should them show up in DU? Because they dont... There is nothing. All are formated with apple_partition_map and HFS+. What could be the issue?

Here is my sil3512 card. It has an SST eeprom chip which WiebeTech's flasher supports. Does your card look like this?

3512.jpg

In System Profiler, does it say "Yes" in Driver Installed as in the attached pic?

Screen Shot1.jpg


screenshot2.jpg


If your SATA drive is SATA II, try setting its jumbers to SATA I (150 MB/s), WD drives have this option.

Restarting may help, sometime my WD SATA HDD doesn't mount. I suspect it's bad connection at SATA connector. My cable uses the click-connect type but the card doesn't have that kind of mechanism.

PS. The WiebeTech's download page is still accessible via archive.org.
https://web.archive.org/web/2011010...ebetech.com/webtech.php?sfid=133&pcode=TC-PCI
 
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Here is my sil3512 card. It has an SST eeprom chip which WiebeTech's flasher supports. Does your card look like this?

In System Profiler, does it say "Yes" in Driver Installed as in the attached pic?



If your SATA drive is SATA II, try setting its jumbers to SATA I (150 MB/s), WD drives have this option.

Restarting may help, sometime my WD SATA HDD doesn't mount. I suspect it's bad connection at SATA connector. My cable uses the click-connect type but the card doesn't have that kind of mechanism.

PS. The WiebeTech's download page is still accessible via archive.org.
https://web.archive.org/web/2011010...ebetech.com/webtech.php?sfid=133&pcode=TC-PCI

Mine has a PMC flashchip, and it looks different. PMC is supported in wiebe osx flasher.
Driver installed: Yes
It is a Seagate drive, indeed it has jumper settings. I set it to 1.5 Gbit/s. However when I open system profiler both new ATA Bus gets listed but are empty.

I thought all SIL3512 cards require a simple flash and thats it. But it seems like WiebeTech work for generic cards only?. Some other may needs a port layout patch in firmware.

Or is there another firmware I could try?
 
Mine has a PMC flashchip, and it looks different. PMC is supported in wiebe osx flasher.
Driver installed: Yes
It is a Seagate drive, indeed it has jumper settings. I set it to 1.5 Gbit/s. However when I open system profiler both new ATA Bus gets listed but are empty.

SATA cards should have drives listed under Serial-ATA not ATA, surely?
 
SATA cards should have drives listed under Serial-ATA not ATA, surely?

I'm not sure because above screenshot list it as ATA Bus.

However my card looking very different compared to generic.

Take a look (yes that molex is connected) :)
IMG_20190213_152113.jpg
 
Yes, they should get listed in ATA section. Even if there are Serial-SATA drives connected to this card.

I found new infos. WiebeTech has verbose output while boot. It says: unable to use the drive in port0 because its not in a "ready" state. Guess I try another drive :) .
 
amedias: do you or anyone else know which 3114 card is known to be working on PPC Macs?

i cant understand why noone has tried to hex-edit the 1s2 firmware file + change the codes to the bios chips or at least attempt to??? or to take the osx kexts out of the firmware file completely by doing a file compare to the files that it extracts out into /System/Library/Caches/com.apple.romextensions on an osx system; how hard would it really be to hex-compare the contents of the kexts to the 1s2 firmware file? and cut them out + reduce the rom in this manner? i will end up trying to do this myself if noone else is gonna step up + make it happen!!!!

(the reason the firmware file requires a large bios flash chip is because of these kexts being inside the chip; they could have easily made seperate versions of the firmware that were os9 only or osx only that fit onto smaller chips!! but they didnt )
 
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amedias: do you or anyone else know which 3114 card is known to be working on PPC Macs?

Not a definitive list no, there's what appears to be some kind of reference pattern card doing the rounds on eBay for not a lot of money being sold in US, UK, EU and out of China that *appears* identical to the one being sold in on US eBay as Mac compatible (seller flashes them).

I've bought a couple of the cheap ones and flashed with Weibtech firmware for 3112 and that seems to get you two working ports out of 4, under OS at least, but not bootable, and only on G3, Sawtooth, and GE G4s, but not DA or QS G4s, not tried in a MDD yet.

That's why I'm trying to get someone with a one of the working 3114s (with all 4 ports and bootable) to dump their ROM for me so I can try it on the cheap cards and see if it does work...if it weren't for the cost of shipping on the US eBay listing being almost as much as the card I'd have bought one by now and done it myself...might still end up doing that at some point but was hoping someone would have one already and be prepared to share.

IF we can get a working ROM for the 3114 cards then it should mean G3/4 SATA for ~£10.
 
I managed to get a 3512 based 2-port card this week and flash it using the Wieb firmware, confirmed working and bootable in my G3 but performance was pretty poor, lower than the IDE card I have fitted, so going to test in some G4's later this week but has anyone else had poor performance from any of the flashed cards?

Still hoping someone will offer up a rom dump from a working 3114 ....
 
I don't think there is speed advantage in these SATA-1 cards (compared to the MDD's ATA100 bus). The reason I use it is to be able to use SATA drives in the MDD's front bay where there is no room for a 3.5" drive with SATA to IDE adapter attached.
 
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i wasn’t looking for a performance boost, but wasn’t expecting such a massive drop!

Fortunately it performs much better in the G4 Sawtooth and DA I’ve tested in this eve, the poor performance seems confined to the G3 so more investigation required...
 
can anyone in this thread confirm for me whether or not the disk is accessible under mac os 9 at all? brainfreeze had confirmed flashing a sil3114 with sil3112/3512 wiebetech firmware let him use all 4 ports and boot frm only the rear 2 in his post here: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...ta-cards-for-mac.1690231/page-8#post-26821051 but i wish he elaborated on whether or not the disk was ACCESSIBLE under os8.6/9.2, i already know that its not bootable under os8.6/9.2, but can the disk be used for storage + to run apps under os8.6/9.2? please someone shed some light on this- once and for all - so some progress can be made here

whoever is out there and has the earlier firmware versions of the 1s2; please SHARE THEM HERE; im talking about 5.0.7, 5.0.6, 5.0.3 and 5.0.0 of ANY other versions other than 5.1.3 or 5.3.1 - if u have different rom versions on your tempo sata / firmtek 1s2 then please; help us help you! attach the file here or post it on mediafire.com account or filedropper.. upload it and make it public so that we can get try to crack this and get some bootable cards available cheap - unless u like seeing people selling 1s2 cards for 400$ on ebay... and you think thats right as rain.. everyone help each other out and lets crack this nut
 
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can anyone in this thread confirm for me whether or not the disk is accessible under mac os 9 at all?
I don't want to muddy the waters but I am running OSX on a SiI3512 card with the Wiebetech firmware. Prior to flashing the card, it was recognised and identified by OSX but not by OS9 and the situation remained the same after flashing, let alone have any attached hard disks mount. I don't think the Wiebetech firmware is going to provide any easy wins on whatever card you manage to flash it on.

The SeriTek firmware is the way to go for OS9 but, as you know, it carries its own set of challenges with it.
 
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