Mac OS X 10.4 bootable Sata PCI Controller

It has been a long time since I had a G4 and might not accurately recall these details. There were some booting limitations on the drive size for some of those G4s, during the boot process they could not address space on the drive larger than the first 8GB, so you might be able to boot, but after some usage if any essential info gets moved past that region on the drive on a larger volume, you might not be able to boot any longer. The solution to that is to use XPostFacto and a bootable <8GB partition on the on-board ATA drive interface that is known to be bootable as the designated helper disc. XPostFacto uses the helper drive for the essential boot information, then XPostFacto completes the booting process to a larger Volume on another drive interface without the < 8GB volume limitation.

https://eshop.macsales.com/OSXCenter/XPostFacto/Framework.cfm?page=XPostFacto3.html

I would contact OWC and ask them about it. The utility was originally developed to help install OSX on older unsupported systems that could only boot into OS9, but the helper disc feature also allows those OSX compatible machines to boot onto drives larger than 8GB partitions on otherwise non-bootable PCI cards.

After checking ebay for used cards, one seller listed Sonnet's specs for its SATA PCI controller card and incompatibility with Quicksilver models was indicated. Acard made bootable, Mac-compatible PCI controller cards at the same time, so that's another search option to try. As I recall, a third company also manufactured Mac controller cards, but I can't remember the name.

"The 2-port PCI SATA card I installed is a SiriTek/152." I think you meant FirmTek's "SeriTek/1S2," as shown here.

Yes, I think you discovered the other booting limitation for an OS 9 partition, it must be <200GB, not sure of the exact number. It may be hard to find the actual articles on the Apple web for those older specs these days, so we have to rely on these shared ancient memories.

I just kept one of the lower internal bays filled with a drive with a <8 GB partition of a clean OS 9 and OS X installation that was known to be bootable for troubleshooting. Also, my MDD G4, in which I upgraded the CPU, would tend to overheat if I had drives in the upper bay near the heatsink, so I only used the lower drive bay and added an extra cooling fan in the upper drive bay to cool off the heat sink better.

PS, I had installed a hardware striped RAID ATA133 card in my G4 and it was nearly as fast as an SSD, but not quite. I later replaced that with a PCI SSD card and it worked great too. I think I continued to use XPostFacto with the helper drive, but I am not really sure now, that was a long time ago.

That's great. If you post the manufacturer of the card, others looking for a Mac-compatible SATA controller card for their Power Mac G4s would be interested.