I have run my PowerMac G4 with three SATA-PCI cards (and a Sonnet CPU Upgrade) for almost three years, if not more in this configuration, with no problems so far.
Lately it happened, that a drive on the Sonnet card did disappear or wasn't accessable (opened icon, opened folder, and then beach ball). I then restarted it and it was ok, till the next morning. This happened three times.
Then I got kernel panics and the Mac would freeze after the grey Apple logo would appear (the circle not having started to rotate).
I unplugged and moved around drives with no success.
Then I read what it actually said in the kernel panic by holding cmd+v.
I found a projovian.driver being loaded as last. I googled and found an allready existing thread with this kernel panic (though the CPU caller was different).
It is my MacAlly SATA-card, that had NO drives attached when the problems started.
So I pulled the card and the Mac came back with the boot-drive. But System Profiler did not show the other cards anymore.
I moved them around: the Sonnet came back.
Moved the SIL3124-"PC"-Card again to another slot and it was back, too.
But the drives were not showing on the Sonnet card.
I put them besides the others on the SIL-"PC-Card (all drives on this card, instead of two here and two there). Now all drives showed up (interestingly also one Samsung 2TB that wasn't shown on the SIL-card three days before (which is why I had put it on Sonnet card).
Today, I put in the Macally card again and everything works with no problems.
Strange. I wonder, what this is or what the reason was for this. Also hope it does not come back again.
(PS: I did PMU resets in between, but this didn't make the kernel panic go away.)
Edit: also the card no show up in strange order:
C - SIL
B - Sonnet
D - MacAlly.
I remember it was A-B-C before.
Lately it happened, that a drive on the Sonnet card did disappear or wasn't accessable (opened icon, opened folder, and then beach ball). I then restarted it and it was ok, till the next morning. This happened three times.
Then I got kernel panics and the Mac would freeze after the grey Apple logo would appear (the circle not having started to rotate).
I unplugged and moved around drives with no success.
Then I read what it actually said in the kernel panic by holding cmd+v.
I found a projovian.driver being loaded as last. I googled and found an allready existing thread with this kernel panic (though the CPU caller was different).
It is my MacAlly SATA-card, that had NO drives attached when the problems started.
So I pulled the card and the Mac came back with the boot-drive. But System Profiler did not show the other cards anymore.
I moved them around: the Sonnet came back.
Moved the SIL3124-"PC"-Card again to another slot and it was back, too.
But the drives were not showing on the Sonnet card.
I put them besides the others on the SIL-"PC-Card (all drives on this card, instead of two here and two there). Now all drives showed up (interestingly also one Samsung 2TB that wasn't shown on the SIL-card three days before (which is why I had put it on Sonnet card).
Today, I put in the Macally card again and everything works with no problems.
Strange. I wonder, what this is or what the reason was for this. Also hope it does not come back again.
(PS: I did PMU resets in between, but this didn't make the kernel panic go away.)
Edit: also the card no show up in strange order:
C - SIL
B - Sonnet
D - MacAlly.
I remember it was A-B-C before.
