Hey all! I picked up a Pismo recently listed as parts/not working and spent a good while chasing down a tricky IDE fault. Sharing the full diagnostic journey here because it turned out to be more interesting than expected, and I'm curious if anyone else has run into this.
PowerBook G3 "Pismo" FireWire, 500MHz. Arrived with the original HDD pulled by the seller. Chassis, display, and keyboard are all in good shape. Whenever anything is connected to the internal IDE bus, original OEM spinning HDD, or an mSATA SSD via adapter, it hangs on boot. From Open Firmware, attempting to boot anything (option key picker, CD, USB, Apple Hardware Test) causes a hard freeze. CD starts spinning and stops. USB booting shows 1-3 seconds of activity then dies. Silent hang every time.
Remove the drive entirely and everything works perfectly: it boots AHT, Tiger installer, OS 9, USB drives, no problem at all.
Worked through this methodically:
dev /pci@f2000000/mac-io@17/ata-4@1f000/disk@0 returned ok. The device opens successfully. Using .properties returned basic device properties readable without issue.
However, boot hd:,\\:tbxi - silent hang. OF issues a READ command to the disk, the bus never gets a response, everything freezes.
So the ATA bus is functional, it can open and identify the device. It fails specifically when trying to read data from it. Seems much more specific fault than a dead controller.
The JM20330 adapters respond to ATA IDENTIFY (a register-level operation) but hang on actual READ commands so I'm wondering if it's a chipset incompatibility with the mSATA adapter.
My only big confusion was that the original OEM drive produced the same symptom. Would a dying drive hanging on reads produce exactly this pattern? Could be why the machine ended up as parts in the first place. Two different faults, identical surface symptom.
From my cursory looks the logic board and cable appear to be fine.
I'm thinking of ordering a CF-IDE adapter since it is passive, but wanted to shoot some questions to the community here and see what input y'all might have. Has anyone else seen this exact symptom on a Pismo or similar G3 — drive detected in OF but silent hang on reads? Any experience with the CF route on a Pismo specifically? Gotchas to watch for? Anyone successfully run the Ableconn IIDE-MSAT (Marvell 88SA8052) in a Pismo? Curious how it compares to CF in practice on this bus.
PowerBook G3 "Pismo" FireWire, 500MHz. Arrived with the original HDD pulled by the seller. Chassis, display, and keyboard are all in good shape. Whenever anything is connected to the internal IDE bus, original OEM spinning HDD, or an mSATA SSD via adapter, it hangs on boot. From Open Firmware, attempting to boot anything (option key picker, CD, USB, Apple Hardware Test) causes a hard freeze. CD starts spinning and stops. USB booting shows 1-3 seconds of activity then dies. Silent hang every time.
Remove the drive entirely and everything works perfectly: it boots AHT, Tiger installer, OS 9, USB drives, no problem at all.
Worked through this methodically:
- Drive identity - original OEM HDD, 128GB mSATA + adapter, 64GB mSATA + adapter, all produce identical symptoms. Not drive-specific.
- IDE ribbon cable - replaced with a new cable. No change whatsoever.
- PRAM/NVRAM - reset multiple times including a full set-defaults in Open Firmware. No effect.
- PMU - hard reset via the recessed button. No effect.
- Adapter chipset - both mSATA adapters used the JM20330 bridge chip, which is known to be problematic on vintage Apple ATA controllers. However, this can't be the root cause since the original OEM Apple drive produced the same symptom before any adapter was introduced.
- Logic board ATA controller (KeyLargo) - initially suspected, but Open Firmware diagnostics cleared this. More on that below.
dev /pci@f2000000/mac-io@17/ata-4@1f000/disk@0 returned ok. The device opens successfully. Using .properties returned basic device properties readable without issue.
However, boot hd:,\\:tbxi - silent hang. OF issues a READ command to the disk, the bus never gets a response, everything freezes.
So the ATA bus is functional, it can open and identify the device. It fails specifically when trying to read data from it. Seems much more specific fault than a dead controller.
The JM20330 adapters respond to ATA IDENTIFY (a register-level operation) but hang on actual READ commands so I'm wondering if it's a chipset incompatibility with the mSATA adapter.
My only big confusion was that the original OEM drive produced the same symptom. Would a dying drive hanging on reads produce exactly this pattern? Could be why the machine ended up as parts in the first place. Two different faults, identical surface symptom.
From my cursory looks the logic board and cable appear to be fine.
I'm thinking of ordering a CF-IDE adapter since it is passive, but wanted to shoot some questions to the community here and see what input y'all might have. Has anyone else seen this exact symptom on a Pismo or similar G3 — drive detected in OF but silent hang on reads? Any experience with the CF route on a Pismo specifically? Gotchas to watch for? Anyone successfully run the Ableconn IIDE-MSAT (Marvell 88SA8052) in a Pismo? Curious how it compares to CF in practice on this bus.