SCSI Card not working with Leopard 10.5.6

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Level 2

234 points

SCSI Card not working with Leopard 10.5.6

In my G5 1.8 duel PowerMac, I have had installed Adaptec's Ultra160 SCSI controller 29160 (bought in 2002) which then has two Medea VideoRaids hard drives attached and this SCSI chain is terminated. I just updated from OS 10.4 to Leopard 10.5.6 last night...

When I boot up, the computer does not see the SCSI drives (they do not mount on the desktop). If I use System Profiler and go down to PCI cards, it does see the card exists (name, type), but that is all. Has anyone had this problem? Any suggestions of how to get them to mount? I use these drives for my Final Cut Studio editing... Just upgraded to Final Cut Studio 2 and this is why I updated the OSX operating system... Now I'm saying "D'oh!" every time I boot. Any thoughts or guidance is welcome. Thanks in advance!

G5 1.8 dual, Mac OS X (10.4.11), 2.5 GB ram Final Cut Studio 1

Posted on Dec 18, 2008 3:09 PM

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Answer 1

Dec 18, 2008 3:15 PM in response to MEW

Welcome to the forum!

Have you checked with Adaptec to see if they have an upgraded driver that works with OS 10.5.6? That would be the first thing to do PRIOR to making the decision of upgrading the OS and FCP.

-DH

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Answer 2

MEW Author

Level 2

234 points

Dec 18, 2008 3:21 PM in response to David Harbsmeier

Hi David, thanks for the question... Ironically, Adaptec has not supported OSX for quite some time, although the PCI SCSI card has worked for me in my G5 through 2 other OSX updates... This jump to Leopard finally seems to have come back to haunt me.

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Answer 3

Dec 18, 2008 3:23 PM in response to MEW

Ouch!

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Answer 4

motley1

Level 1

9 points

Mar 18, 2009 12:14 AM in response to MEW

Happily, there is a solution to this problem, and I am benefiting from it now!

This problem - not being able to load a working driver for Adaptec SCSI cards that will work with Leopard, e.g. 10.5.6 - has been noted by quite a few others.

There is a (now-closed) discussion on this on the Apple forums at:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1299728

The solution mentioned there does work: on another partition or drive, boot up into OS 10.4. Run the Adaptec driver install package from there, but choose your 10.5.6 partition/drive to install onto. Finished. Works perfectly.

It is noted that - if you are in 10.5.6 and just run the available Adaptec driver install package, you will get the following: "Install Failed - The following install step failed: run preinstall script for Adaptec SCSI Card ...". However, if you install from 10.4 onto your 10.5.6 partition, no problem. The solution produces a proper read/write SCSI interface (before this approach some people had ended up in a read-only situation).

FYI here is the same issue and solution as discussed on Accelerate Your Mac (skip down to "Driver Install Tip for Adaptec SCSI card/OS X Leopard Users":
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/archives/mar08/032708.html

So far as I can know, the Adaptec 29160 best uses the v1.3beta driver, and the 2906 needs the v1.1 driver. If there are more up-to-date drivers, let me know. The 2906 had a 1.3 driver, but that was OS 9 only.

Good luck and enjoy. I'm very happy to have my scanner back. Now if I can just remember this approach when we get Snow Leopard!

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