Sonnet Tempo-x esata 4+4 troubles

[spf2]

I am trying to add additional SATA drives to my G5 ( Leopard ) so I purchased a Sonnet Tempo-x esata 4+4. I put in the card and it was detected initially but when I copied files over to the SATA drive, it would lock up the OS. So i searched on Sonnet's website and I installed the 2.2.4 software . The pkg installed fine. It wanted to reboot after it completed. I clicked the restart button. Then a pop up says it will write to boot cache and when it is complete it will reboot. I clicked OK and let it do its thing. On reboot, the card shows up only as a PCI device that has no driver. So I tried it again, this time I noticed after I ran the package install before the reboot that the card is recognized and I can access the SATA drive. Once the server reboots though, the card is not detected again. Anyone have a clue what's going on and how to get Leopard to see the card. I don't want to run the software updater every single time to access the SATA drive. I have tried resetting the PRAM. I did not find the PMU reset. This is a single 1.8 G5 PCI-X.

 

[for this]

When booting, the driver in the card will be copied into the mac. I would try clearing them manually.

(taken from Sonnet's support page)
1) Delete and empty trash for the following file and two directories:
/System/Library/Extensions.mkext (a file)
/System/Library/Caches/com.apple.kernelcaches (a directory)
/System/Library/Caches/com.apple.romextensions (a directory)

2) Restart

Then I would repair disk permissions from the Disk Utility.

I also occasionally had the lock-up problem when transferring large files to a SATA drive connected to a SATA card. I believe it was because the SATA cable was not securely connected to the card. The cable I used was a type with a latch at one end while the card's connectors needed another type without the latch to fit snugly. In the end, I desoldered the card connectors and changed them to the ones that suited the cable's connector (finding the cable with the right length was harder than changing the card connectors for me) and the problem was gone.

 

[spf2]

I tried what you suggested above and it is still the same. I opened up the pkg in Pacifier and found the SonnetSATA.ktext , flash program and ROM. The default install location was /tmp . I checked the /system/Library/Extensions/ and could not find SonnetSATA.ktext. Anyways, I tried it on my Dual G4 with Tiger installed and it did not recognize the card either. Same result as Leopard on the G5. I plan on putting the card in the G5 Dual 2GHz machine and see if I can get it working there. I also got a response from Sonnet support. I was disappointed to say the least.


Hi;

Sorry we do not have any information for the PCIx to help you .
Thanks,

Don
Sonnet Technologies
Technical and Customer Support

 

[spf2]

Here is what it is reporting after I run the installer but before the reboot and update rom cache. Not sure if there is a way to script the loading of the firmware manually. It seems to work fine until I reboot. This card also works in Windows as well. Any chance putting it in a Windows machine and swapping it back to Mac might fix it. On a side note, since I had my G5 open I started fiddle with X850XTPE that was not working before. I got that working again.

 

[for this]

Is it totally consistent that when you reboot, the card won't be recognized?

If so, I could think of 2 reasons:

- Conflict with other drivers or other cards

- The card ROM doesn't get flashed properly. So the only time the card is recognized is just after installing the driver and before rebooting. And the reason you couldn't find the SonnetSATA.ktext may be because it was erased when rebooting and didn't get reloaded from the card as it should have been. Just a guess.

 

[spf2]

It is totally consistent, it happens on this G5 and on a G4 MDD that I tried it on. So it happens on different versions of OSX as well ( Leopard , Tiger ). The only other card is the video card. I have tried it with 3 different video cards. 2 flashed and one standard apple video card. The files are written to /tmp which gets dumped after a reboot according to Pacifier when I opened the pkg file.