SCSI Booting Problems

Boot from the CD. Your SCSI Drive should mount on the Desktop. Use the Startup Disk Control Panel from the CD to look at your Drives. It should show you:
• a line item for your newly-updated SCSI Drive. Click on the triangle to reveal the contents, which should be...
• a sub-item showing your System folder
• and that System Folder should have a distinctive Icon (interlocking faces)

Choose this as your Startup Disk and restart, and you should be in business.

If there is a problem, Run Apple System Profiler from the CD to look around and see what drives are there.

The two most common SCSI problems are lack of proper Termination, and duplicate drive addresses. You must understand where your Termination is coming from, and that only the the end of the cable is terminated. Termination Power is good to have, but is not the same as Termination.

Post back with any unusual results and folks here will be glad to help you sort this out.

Noah,

Zip drives are also set to ID 5 but I presume that is on another chain. Have you tried changing the ID to something else just to experiment?

Jim

Floppy Vs Folder is not significant.

Booted from the CD, look at your Hard Drive. Select the Icon for the Hard Drive and choose Get Info from the File menu. It should report, among other things, the SCSI ID of the Drive and the version of the Driver in use. Any surprises?

Dismiss the GetInfo box and open the Icon for the Hard Drive. Look for the System Folder. Does it have a distinctive Icon, like a Mac SE or the Interlocking Faces Icon? If not, your System Folder is not blessed, and the Boot blocks are not correct. You can use this procedure to confirm and fix:

18611- Mac OS: Reblessing Old System Folder After Clean Install

I suggest you re-bless it anyway. It doesn't take long and it will re-write the boot blocks to be sure they are correct. If the boot blocks were correct, the flashing question mark should progress to the Happy Mac [SE] -- happy because it found valid Boot Blocks.

The Adaptec site has information on several variants of this card for different operating Systems, version 4.1 of the [Mac] firmware and a firmware upadate program, and a utility for checking and setting a few extra parameters.

Is it possible this is a card from a PC? If so, it could probably be re-flashed to work with a Mac.

Noah

I think this card is raid capable, if possible, make sure it is selected to not run as a raid. Unlike older Macs, B&W G3s can't boot from RAID volumes due to a limitation of openfirmware that exists in OS X.

I am running a SIIG raid card that is running in non-RAID and it boots fine.

Frank
If it ain't broke, open it up and find out why!!

Beige G3@416/80MHz CDRW/DVD-RW Mac OS X (10.3.9) B&W G4@600mhz/1GB/raid /CD-DVD-RW

Noah,

I went through exactly the same process.
I purchased the same card thinking I could flash it and run it on the Mac, but it just did not happen.
I could actually format the drive and use it, but nor my Beige, neither my B&W would boot from it (the B&W would actually freeze with this card in one of the slots). After some research, I found out that the PC version of the card has a different ROM chip which does not allow booting on a Mac.
You can find a lot of information on the subject on the XLR8 site
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/.
I got my hands on one of those old ATTO which came in the Beige G3's, and my 18 gig SCSI is purring away with 10.4.6 on it installed.
The only problem I have is that it would not allow me to have more than one SCSI drive attached to it (divine mysteries.......).

cheers

The APPLE ATTO version of the Express PCI PSC SCSI card implements a Fast & Wide Single-Ended Bus. Its total cable length is limited to a nominal 1.5 meters, counting all extension cables and wiring on the boards of the drives.

I have used three drives when the original Apple "teflon" cable is used, and careful attention is paid to exactly which drive is terminated. For use in Mac OS X, the firmware should be updated with ATTO or Apple firmware updaters.

The APPLE/ATTO UL2D [with second internal connector removed] shipped in G4s, and should work fine in the Blue & White G3. It implements a faster Ultra2/LVD Bus, with very long cable lengths allowed, provided ALL drives are also LVD. It also has a separate external Bus. Firmware update for Mac OS X also required.

Booting from these cards under Mac OS X is an interesting issue. They are supported on G4s, and should be supported on G3s, but I have just noticed that I have not been using them to Boot G3s, since I accidentally did not have the drives available to do it. More research will be required.

Grant,

More research has been going on from several angles. I checked and the Sun Microsystem drive works just fine in an external SCSI sled plugged into the 25 pin external SCSI chain of a G3 DT but was not recognized (or initially recognized and not accepted, nor would it allow the boot process to continue) by the ATTO SCSI card in the B&W.

Your link to the wikipedia tretise on SCSI is worth mentioning again here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_SCSI

for the benefit of Noah.

Jim

Some active terminators work better than others, cable could be bad, and then some 9GB drives (Ultrastar?) had a problem.

Drive Setup 2.0.4 doesn't work with all LVD drives either.

Do you have Disk Warrior?

Have you looked at the card and drive in Power Domain???

Noah,

Two quotes:

Does anyone know why the card will boot after inserting and removing a valid boot disk into the cd?

I have found one way to get the computer to start up. I put in the CD and wait until the flashing question mark turns into a happy mac and then press the eject button on the cd drive. The CD comes out, the computer returns to a flashing question mark for a bit but then goes to the SCSI drive, boots and works fine.

Computers are only useful if they are predictable. It looks like there is something in the timing of the data that loads into RAM or the timing of triggering a wakeup call to the SCSI drive. I cannot point to some wonderful paragraph in the developer notes that would be the magic bullet. But we can focus on just what you observed.

The SCSI drive has startup timers to delay the introduction of data until it is needed and until the CPU can deal with it. Those settings / jumpers are worth a look.

Second, you say that you can eject the CD after the happy mac face appears. There is a clue. Something has loaded to wake up the HDD but interestingly enough, the CPU has not seized control of the CD platter. At some point, as we all know, eject buttons do not work on mac CDs, zip disks or floppies. The fact that you can alert the CPU to the existence of an acceptable boot device, produce a happy icon, and STILL eject that CD tells us that timing is an issue.

Jim