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does anyone know if the Wiebetech flashed SIL3112 cards will work in a vintage intel hackintosh ? (tiger/leopard/SL) booting? non booting? any info helps thanks
Short answer: no.
Long answer: that firmware is for PPC based macs.(so definitely not bootable) Included driver may not be compiled for Intel at all.(anyway, works on Leopard at most, tested it on SL PPC did not work)

Windows Firmware will work in Windows(Bios PC) of course, but you have no Mac OS X driver there)
 
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Not my listing, but I've been eyeing this card up for a while due to the price. 64-bit is very appealing and it has the SiI3112 controller... Anyone have any experience with these in a Quicksilver? Would it be bootable?
There's this one, too.
 
My closest card to the card you have is Sil3512 with WiebieTech firmware. Here is my experience with it.

One SATA II WD drive = all good

One SATA III Seagate drive = OK, but it will not show up in the Startup Manager when you boot with Option key pressed.

Two SATA III Seagate drives = hangs, crashes, etc.

SATA II WD drive + SATA III Seagate drive = hangs, crashes, etc.



And here is my experience with my Sil3112 card with Firmtek firmware and regulator swapping.

One SATA II WD drive = all good

One SATA III Seagate drive (1TB or 2TB) = 1TB is all good, 2TB works and boots fine in OS X, can't boot OS 9 but works fine in it.

Two SATA III Seagate drives = hangs, crashes, very slow when copying file between the connected drives, etc.

SATA II WD drive + SATA III Seagate drive = hangs, crashes, very slow when copying file between the connected drives, etc.

Samsung 860 EVO (SATA III) = hangs, crashes, etc.


Using both of the cards with a drive connected to each one = hangs, crashes, etc.


Both cards have occasional problem about drive not mounting (disk not ready). Rebooting should fix it.


I wonder if two WD drives will work. I wish I had another WD drive to try. Because unlike other drives today, current SATA III (6Gb/s) WD drives have jumpers that you can set it to SATA I (1.5 Gb/s). This will eliminate ambiguous SATA speed that needs negotiation.
After looking at the Sonnet Tempo 2 channal PCI SATA quick user guide and found that the newest OS mentioned in it was 10.3 while all the tests I've done were on 10.4.11 and 10.5.8. So I tried connecting two drives to the card and booted into OS 9.

The flashed SIL3112 card with 1s2 firmware works fine with two drives connected in OS 9.
 
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Not my listing, but I've been eyeing this card up for a while due to the price. 64-bit is very appealing and it has the SiI3112 controller... Anyone have any experience with these in a Quicksilver? Would it be bootable?
There's this one, too.
Having three SIL3112 chips on the board, the first one is not a standard card.
I doubt you can flash it using the known procedure.

The second one doesn't use Silicon Image chip at all.
 
Is there a driver for os 8.6 and/or os 9 that will let me use this card for non bootable storage drives. I flashed one of these sil3112 cards with the firmware from the front page. Its in my g3 blue and white connected to a sata drive that i can boot 10.4 from. I have an 80 gb seagate connected to the main ultra ata channel that i use for 8.6 and 9.2.2. I cant add a second hard drive to the ultra ata because its a rev a board and i do not want to remove the zip drive to put another hard drive in its place. I also do not want to switch to a rev b board, i am seeing how well i can work around the rev a boards issues and still have a stable computer. OS 8.6 and 9.2 cant see the drive with 10.4 on the sata card at all. I dont really mind that because i use open firmware with the multi-boot command to select the tiger drive when i need to switch from classic. Since i have a spare port on the card i was wondering if there is a driver that would let me use it for a storage drive that classic can see. I know about the seritek firmware that would let me boot classic and tiger but i do not feel like soldering a new flash chip in and i do not care if i can boot classic from it.
 
Is there a driver for os 8.6 and/or os 9 that will let me use this card for non bootable storage drives. I
No. If you want OS9 support you need to flash it with the SeriTek firmware and for that you will need to modify the card with specific chips. The Wiebetech firmwares are strictly OS X only.
 
Is there a driver for os 8.6 and/or os 9 that will let me use this card for non bootable storage drives. I flashed one of these sil3112 cards with the firmware from the front page. Its in my g3 blue and white connected to a sata drive that i can boot 10.4 from. I have an 80 gb seagate connected to the main ultra ata channel that i use for 8.6 and 9.2.2. I cant add a second hard drive to the ultra ata because its a rev a board and i do not want to remove the zip drive to put another hard drive in its place. I also do not want to switch to a rev b board, i am seeing how well i can work around the rev a boards issues and still have a stable computer. OS 8.6 and 9.2 cant see the drive with 10.4 on the sata card at all. I dont really mind that because i use open firmware with the multi-boot command to select the tiger drive when i need to switch from classic. Since i have a spare port on the card i was wondering if there is a driver that would let me use it for a storage drive that classic can see. I know about the seritek firmware that would let me boot classic and tiger but i do not feel like soldering a new flash chip in and i do not care if i can boot classic from it.
You should be able to extract the 'NDRV' from the Seritek firmware and package it as a disk based driver for the classic Mac OS, or you could simply load it in Open Firmware each boot from disk.

The latter can be done with a script.
 
If you chose to load the 'NDRV' from Open Firmware, the disk would then be bootable from the classic Mac OS, assuming you don't go beyond the size barrier for a given OS boot disk.

Tho it may not work to mix FCODE from Webitech and FrmTek, so it maybe necessary to reduce the Frmtek firmware and flash that to your card.

Just for fun, download this file:

Boot into Open Firmware( CMD+Opt+O+F ) and navigate to the SATA card in the device tree( Something like:

dev pci ls
For a list of devices on the PCI bus:

or
Code:
dev pci1 ls
dev pci2 ls

devalias

Then

Code:
dev pci/@x

boot hd:,\SerilTek.txt

.properties

boot hd:,\\:tbxi

The boot hd:,\SerialTek.txt assumes the path to the attached file, so check the alias to hd to figure what disk that is in your system. Also you can append the partition, such as hd:9,\ for partition 9 and so on.

Not specifying the partition will just make Open Firmware check the first valid partition on hd: that it finds.
 

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If you chose to load the 'NDRV' from Open Firmware, the disk would then be bootable from the classic Mac OS, assuming you don't go beyond the size barrier for a given OS boot disk.

Tho it may not work to mix FCODE from Webitech and FrmTek, so it maybe necessary to reduce the Frmtek firmware and flash that to your card.

Just for fun, download this file:

Boot into Open Firmware( CMD+Opt+O+F ) and navigate to the SATA card in the device tree( Something like:


For a list of devices on the PCI bus:

or
Code:
dev pci1 ls
dev pci2 ls

devalias

Then

Code:
dev pci/@x

boot hd:,\SerilTek.txt

.properties

boot hd:,\\:tbxi

The boot hd:,\SerialTek.txt assumes the path to the attached file, so check the alias to hd to figure what disk that is in your system. Also you can append the partition, such as hd:9,\ for partition 9 and so on.

Not specifying the partition will just make Open Firmware check the first valid partition on hd: that it finds.
That is for booting right? I am not interested in booting classic off the sata drive at the moment. I would have to install or clone os9 to another sata disk and install it in my g3 and i dont want to do that right now. You mentioned using the firmware to create a disk based driver, what exactly does that mean and how would i go about doing it. If getting classic to see the sata disk as storage requires replacing the flash chip or i have to type open firmware commands every time it is not worth it to me to do and i will just use an external firewire drive for more storage.
 
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That is for booting right? I am not interested in booting classic off the sata drive. I would have to install or clone os9 to another sata disk and install it in my g3 and i dont want to do that right now. You mentioned using the firmware to create a disk based driver, what exactly does that mean and how would i go about doing it. If getting classic to see the sata disk as storage requires replacing the flash chip or i have to type open firmware commands every time it is not worth it to me to do and i will just use an external firewire drive for more storage.
This loads the 'NDRV' into the device tree, the Mac OS ROM will copy the .properties( assuming you're on New World? ) and the disks should work with the classic Mac OS, no need to boot from the drive.

The 'NDRV' is just a native device driver for the classic Mac OS, the attached file would need to be converted from FCODE to binary and placed in the System Folder\Extensions folder if you don't care if the drives are bootable or not. Maybe @joevt can help us with that?

According to Apple's documentation on 'NDRV's only a data fork is needed for an disk based 'NDRV', so once we convert it to hex/binary we should be able to just drop it into the Extensions folder and it should "Just work" get loaded very early in the boot process before all the other extension, but I've never really been able to get that to work. So it maybe necessary for us to give it a resource fork with some matching data to help the 'NDRV' match the card in the IORegName space. Maybe @joevt can expound on that as well.

I do have some basic understanding of how to add a resource fork for that if it is necessary, if Joe can help us convert it to hex/binary( a data fork ). That would give us some nice icon for the Extension as well as help the system know it's a driver to be placed in the Extension folder if someone just dropped it over the System Folder and add some nice Get Info information for the finder and system.
 
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Tho it may not work to mix FCODE from Webitech and FrmTek, so it maybe necessary to reduce the Frmtek firmware and flash that to your card.
I think there might be a flaw in this plan unless you can work out how to bypass the hardware check inside the FirmTek firmware. No one else has managed it, not even SATAman.
 
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If getting classic to see the sata disk as storage requires replacing the flash chip or i have to type open firmware commands every time it is not worth it to me to do and i will just use an external firewire drive for more storage.
It's pretty easy to reduce the FrmTek firmware to fit a smaller flashrom chip, any who we can leverage the NVRAMRC to automate the Open Firmware commands to load the 'NDRV' on each boot, makes booting seamless and still allows booting from attached SATA drives of you chose. Just if you zap the PRAM it' would be necessary to re write the script to the NVRAMRC, however, if you use something like XPOSTFACTO or any other tool that writes to the NVRAMRC it would get overwritten.

As a side, I did note from that attached FCODE for the 'NDRV' that it list 7 channels for SATA and also has some code for the PATA adapters too. So this 'NDRV' contains some code for other adapters and it should be possible to use a 4 port SATA card based on the 3112 chipset under the classic Mac OS with this 'NDRV'. It would be cool to soft raid a 4 port card under OS 9, not bootable, but maybe in redundant RIAD mode for extra backup.

Other chipsets for SATA are likely supported maybe Silxxxx with who knows how many ports. As it has code for the PATA 133p+ card too.

One last thing, drives larger than 120GB maybe iffy under the classic Mac OS, even as data drives. I've had some issues with a 240GB SSD partitioned to 120GB for OS 9 and 120GB for Tiger. Copying data to the second partition( Tiger ) from OS 9 does not always work. As OS 9 can see both partitions but really doesn't support a single drive this large. Some people have had luck booting OS 9 from partitions as large as 190GB, so who knows.
 
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You'll have to go into some detail?

What is this "hard check" of which you speak?
The SeriTek/FirmTek firmware has an inbuilt hardware check. It can only be flashed onto 3 specific ROM chips. Flashrom is the only carrier for flashing onto 3rd party cards. When it loads the firmware, the firmware does a check on the card. If it doesn't detect any of the 3 chips, no flashing will occur. It's not like the Wiebetech firmware where you can just delete a load of zeroes from the end to trim it to size. The firmware, I believe, is encrypted but I haven't opened it up to look.

Hence all the guides telling you to solder off the ROM chip and replace it with one of the sanctioned ones.
 
The SeriTek/FirmTek firmware has an inbuilt hardware check. It can only be flashed onto 3 specific ROM chips. Flashrom is the only carrier for flashing onto 3rd party cards. When it loads the firmware, the firmware does a check on the card. If it doesn't detect any of the 3 chips, no flashing will occur. It's not like the Wiebetech firmware where you can just delete a load of zeroes from the end to trim it to size. The firmware, I believe, is encrypted but I haven't opened it up to look.

Hence all the guides telling you to solder off the ROM chip and replace it with one of the sanctioned ones.
Ok, now I remember reading that before, thanks for clarifying and not making me search;-)

That's pretty trivial if they did it in the FCODE, a little harder if they did it in the ROM based 'NDRV', but still doable. If the check is in the OS X driver in the ROM, it's likely not worth the effort as we don't have the source code for that .kext and IDA Pro is such a pain in the ass on PowerPC:-(

Anywho for like $60 bucks on Ebay( not my listing ) you can buy a card with the proper Firmware for Mac OS/X booting and be done with it. I would not waste my time for $60 to bother with surface mount soldering of the EEROM. This seller, I believe, has found a source of 3112 cards with the correct size and type of EEPROM already on them, as my card has no signs the EEPROM was ever replaced, and I can tell.

Also, he has changed the VOLTAGE IC with one that is compatible with all systems with PCI, or so it is told. It didn't work on my card and I had to replace the voltage IC with the OEM one from a dead donor card I had on hand. This makes the card not work in the DA/QS, but I only wanted it for Old World anyways.

Likely just a cold solder joint on the IC as this seller has sold many cards and did promptly send me a return shipping label to send the card back to his US affiliate to fix the issue. It just wan't worth my trip to the post office vs soldering a 3 pin IC;-)
 
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Thanks for all the replies to my question. I am using a G3 blue and white rev a, that is the reason i cannot add a slave drive to the ultra ata for storage and why i am using a sata card at all. I found an 80gb seagate that seems to work fine on the ultra ata channel, thats running 8.6 and 9.2. The sil3112 is connected to a sata drive with tiger. I do not want to spend 60 dollars on a sata card just to add classic booting capability that i dont need, nor do i want to mess with changing cards and card firmwares because my rev a is happy with this setup and i dont want to make it angry. The only reason i would need to see the card from classic is if i decided i wanted to add a storage drive to the second port on the sata card or so i could use the startup control panel in classic to select the tiger drive. Since classic cannot see this card i have to use the open firmware multi-boot command to switch to tiger. This is only a minor annoyance to me because i spend most of my time in one or the other and dont switch much. Im not sure if anyone besides me is interested in a storage only driver for classic or if its worth the effort to develop one. If its not i can always use a firewire drive for extra storage its just slightly less convenient than an internal one.
 
The easiest way is if you can locate one of the cards with a socketed ROM. These were available in the US but I have yet to see one in Europe. No soldering necessary and the replacement ROMs are cheap to buy locally. The firmware is still very buggy for DA/QS even after changing the voltage regulator.
 
Thanks for all the replies to my question. I am using a G3 blue and white rev a, that is the reason i cannot add a slave drive to the ultra ata for storage and why i am using a sata card at all. I found an 80gb seagate that seems to work fine on the ultra ata channel, thats running 8.6 and 9.2. The sil3112 is connected to a sata drive with tiger. I do not want to spend 60 dollars on a sata card just to add classic booting capability that i dont need, nor do i want to mess with changing cards and card firmwares because my rev a is happy with this setup and i dont want to make it angry. The only reason i would need to see the card from classic is if i decided i wanted to add a storage drive to the second port on the sata card or so i could use the startup control panel in classic to select the tiger drive. Since classic cannot see this card i have to use the open firmware multi-boot command to switch to tiger. This is only a minor annoyance to me because i spend most of my time in one or the other and dont switch much. Im not sure if anyone besides me is interested in a storage only driver for classic or if its worth the effort to develop one. If its not i can always use a firewire drive for extra storage its just slightly less convenient than an internal one.
Two other options: An ATA PCI card. Sonnets come up every now and then and should be half the price of a SATA card or less. Alternatively, you could dip your feet into SCSI. My B/W had a SCSI card inside.
 
I prefer to use sata over ata if possible, i got this card for 12 dollars and i have a stack of good 80-200gb sata drives i pulled from computers updated to ssds that i otherwise have no use for. Its also way easier to run sata cables than ata ribbon cables. I am actually putting a scsi card in it if the computer tolerates it, mainly for the external port but it does have a 50 pin internal. I suppose i could get some kind of scsi to sd and use an sd card for storage if i need it, i could also use it for testing other operating systems temporarily.
 
This loads the 'NDRV' into the device tree, the Mac OS ROM will copy the .properties( assuming you're on New World? ) and the disks should work with the classic Mac OS, no need to boot from the drive.

The 'NDRV' is just a native device driver for the classic Mac OS, the attached file would need to be converted from FCODE to binary and placed in the System Folder\Extensions folder if you don't care if the drives are bootable or not. Maybe @joevt can help us with that?

According to Apple's documentation on 'NDRV's only a data fork is needed for an disk based 'NDRV', so once we convert it to hex/binary we should be able to just drop it into the Extensions folder and it should "Just work" get loaded very early in the boot process before all the other extension, but I've never really been able to get that to work. So it maybe necessary for us to give it a resource fork with some matching data to help the 'NDRV' match the card in the IORegName space. Maybe @joevt can expound on that as well.

I do have some basic understanding of how to add a resource fork for that if it is necessary, if Joe can help us convert it to hex/binary( a data fork ). That would give us some nice icon for the Extension as well as help the system know it's a driver to be placed in the Extension folder if someone just dropped it over the System Folder and add some nice Get Info information for the finder and system.
Is there a file download url you want me to look at? I would just use the methods discussed in https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...se-cards-flashing-quest.2331218/post-30827719

Disk based ndrv drivers are discussed in:

I don't remember doing much work with ndrv's though.

List all files with their file type and creator (tested in Monterey - I'm not sure when xattr first existed)
Code:
IFS=$'\n'
for thefile in $(find /Volumes/Classic/System\ Folder/Extensions -type f); do
	thetype="$(xattr -p com.apple.FinderInfo $thefile)"
	printf "%4s:%4s \"%s\"\n" "${thetype:0:4}" "${thetype:4:4}" "$thefile"
done | sort

You can use derez to look at the resources.
 
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Is there a file download url you want me to look at?
SeriTek/1S2 5.1.3

Inside the package you can find the /Volumes/1S2_513/SeriTek1S2Flasher.app/Contents/Resources/ROMFILE.1S2

If we can use your tools to extract the 'NDRV' from the file and make it a hex data fork?

Didn't you do this for SixtySix? Only you extracted the 'NDRV' form the 4MB BootROM of the 8600 and placed it into the AppleNDRV folder in OS X to make video out work on the 8600?

I forget where a read it, likely in the PDF you linked, but classic MacOS 'NDRV's only needs a data fork( you know that start with Joy!peffpwpc ) Same format used in the OS X AppleNDRV folder for video cards.

Presumably one need only drop one of the 'NDRV' files from that folder into the OS 9 Extension folder and it work just work, tho I've never really been able to get that to work, I just hacked the ATI Driver Update Extension to include an 'NDRV' of my choosing for OS X for ATI cards. Or I placed the 'NDRV' into the New World Mac OS ROM's that include a generic display 'NDRV'.
 
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I forget where a read it, likely in the PDF you linked, but classic MacOS 'NDRV's only needs a data fork( you know that start with Joy!peffpwpc ) Same format used in the OS X AppleNDRV folder for video cards.
I tried that, and it doesn't work with just a data fork for the 9200 mobility in my iBook G4 under OS 9, but I'm pretty sure I can hack together a resource fork if we can properly format the data fork.
 
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