Is there any way to modify the bootrom firmware of a Quicksilver G4 to recognize large hard drives?

If I recall from past experience anything higher than 10.2 or Jaguar OS X should make the firmware recognize drives larger than 128GB. It was OS X 10.1 and below plus 9.2.2 which did NOT allow for drives >128GB to be recognized.

The 2002 version of the Quicksilver allowed for LBA-48 or large drive support, but try to install any OS X higher than 10.2 and see if it works for you. I know I have seen this before.

Report back your results.

Romko

It is a physical hardware limitation, not software or firmware.

The ATA controller's addressing bit capacity.

Only Firmtek Seritek cards or cards that use Firmtek controller chips will support boot to connected drives.

Of the G4s, only models that have ATA controllers with 48 bit LBA have native support for hard drives larger than 137 GB (128 GB formatted). The first tower to have this was the Quicksilver 2002.

Reports of a few late model QS machines of the first series produced just prior to the release of the QS 2002 in the late winter and early spring of 2002 also having 48 bit LBA were made. Notes that the firmware version was also different than earlier QS machines were also tied to those reports.

Conjecture has it that those late QS machines had the QS 2002 ATA controller.

More likely, they had the QS 2002 logic board with original QS processors....

Verification of large drive support in machines prior to the QS 2002 is likely impossible at this point. Certainly it was never officially recognized nor claimed.

Only Firmtek Seritek cards or cards that use Firmtek controller chips will support boot to connected drives.

In response to :

What about bootable SATA cards?

What happens when the battery dies while using this hack?

If the contents of the PRAM are lost, same as a PRAM reset; the hack is gone. Access any data beyond the supported 128 GB limit without the hack or support, the system crashes and data is likely lost.

romko23 wrote:

If I recall from past experience anything higher than 10.2 or Jaguar OS X should make the firmware recognize drives larger than 128GB. It was OS X 10.1 and below plus 9.2.2 which did NOT allow for drives >128GB to be recognized.

or was that Master/Slave support on a single ribbon cable? I don't remember.

If I recall from past experience anything higher than 10.2 or Jaguar OS X should make the firmware recognize drives larger than 128GB.

Only if the hardware is compatible with 48 bit LBA.

Jaguar is when OS X gained support for 48 bit LBA capable drives and controllers.

Use of the controllers in G4's began as discussed previously.

Check out the hack here:

http://4thcode.blogspot.jp/2007/12/using-128-gib-or-larger-ata-hard-drives.html

It's more or less in lieu of the Intech driver.....

btw, is it save to use a 160GB drive (or a 150GB Velociraptor with SATA-Ide adaptor) on a 128GB-limit controller?

Which way would it have to be partitioned so that it is usable.

I tried a WD blue IDE 160GB. Formatted a 127GB and a "rest" partition on a SUA XRack 100e SATA/ATA-133-PCI-Card (also Macsense) and than took it to the sawtooth onboard ATA-66 controller. Both partitions were seen in the Finder, but I could not install the OS. I installed the OS via FW and then it still had problems.

Then I tried a 160GB Seagate IDE. The SUA-Card didn't recognize it, so I took it in a FW-enclosure and swapped it back. Only the 127GB were seen on the Finder. Disk utility showed both, the latter greyed out. I could not start from it.

I once asked Hitachi, if I could just use a 160GB drive. The said no because, the OS could one time start writing small files in the area that is not seen during the booting process and would make the OS unusable/unbootable.

is it save to use a 160GB drive (or a 150GB Velociraptor with SATA-Ide adaptor) on a 128GB-limit controller?

If you use a 160 GB drive as is, 137 GB formatted will give you 128 GB of usable space.

The leftover 20 GB is just that, leftover.

Forget about it.

20 GB isn't that much.

If you really, really want the 20 GB, use the Intech HiCap driver.

IF you format the drive outside and then install it inside on the native bus of a non 48 bit LBA machine, the OS will at some point write to the area beyond the 128 GB (formatted) limit and the results are disastrous; failure to boot, likelihood of data loss high.

As for SATA, a SATA PCI controller is independent off the native controller of the host board, so the capacity limit then moves to 2.2 TB. That limit is simply due to the limits of Apple Partition Mapping, necessary for boot in PPC machines.

Thank you!

I hope the following is not to off topic, so I apologize in advance.

As for SATA, I was referring to using a bridge SATA-IDE and connect it to the onboard controller. I was thinking that one would still profit from access times, when throuput is not the main aim. Also my thought was, that you launch an application once and then it stays in memory (or virtual memory) and it would no further effect the speed of lets say copiing files from one drive to another (lets say on an additional PCI-Card).

(only 512MB of the 2GB RAM are used up anyways, most of the time, so there must be enough for swapping files etc. for OS X, I guess? Well, I guess this will have its end of usability as soon as I would intensively use Logic Studio...?)

When using a SATA-PCI-Card, I read that the PCI protocoll negotiations would not make up good for boot drives, so one would rather use the onboard controller. Is that only the case for boot or for application launch as well (I mean, I would see boot times as important anyway.).

I do not know how to link to a post in another thread (saving hole discussions as pdf isn't possible here either, I understand), so I copy your post from another thread:

"A SSD on the internal bus with OS and applications would decrease boot time and application launch over a standard rotational drive.

It would also provide fast VM memory, though, typically due to capacity vs price issues, people tend to have "just enough" SSD.... often too small for the VM demands of OS X (especially Leopard). Then, OS X will run out of VM faster and rely more on memory.

Pro apps will starve for VM as well.

Launch is real fast, though.

A SSD will not increase computational speed. No drive will.

What a drive will do is provide capacity for virtual memory (VM).

A SSD on an external device like a FW drive would not produce good results and likely actually increase boot time and be a waste of the potential data rate of the SSD due to FW bus limitations.

Use of a PCI card and eSATA would provide for data throughput but slow boot due to PCI bus negotiations.

A fast 2 TB drive like a WD Black or Hitachi 7K would provide virtually the same read write speeds PLUS allow for large VM usage thus freeing RAM.

On a 1.5 Gbps bus, a SSD is lost. A fast 2 TB drive with 32 or 64 MB cache is a real pick me up.

If this is all for use with Photoshop or with Final Cut, a second, large drive for VM is essential for performance.

BTW, what need drives your question?"

Found here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4827355?start=0&tstart=0

I would use my SATA-PCI Cards for connecting the 1TB drives with files on it, not the OS or application. (Having a Velociraptor 150GB latest revision, which I got cheap, as Boot and application drive).

SORRY for my long winded post!

May I go one step further and link to another question, while we are at it? I heard that you can use the GUID partition to go over 2,2TB for PowerPCs, when you only use the drive for droping files to. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3847618?answerId=21336931022#21336931022