And so ...

I'm trying to "upgrade" my PPC (OS X - 10.3.9 / Panther) - Setup .

I have a Silicon Image SIL 3512 SATA / RAID 2 Port PCI - Card
and a Toshiba 160GB SATA - Drive (it's a "Laptop" - model ; all I have in hand at this moment .) .

I did the WiebeSATA3512Flash and wrote the firmware to the card (option A), first it failed nagging about the kext not being authentic, but I ran the *.command again and then it succeeded .

Now I can see the card is detected (in System Profiler),
but somehow I see no trace of the SATA - Drive .

I even booted off of Panther install CD just in case if the drive is detected @ that point .

 

whoaa, i thought i am the only one who is still using my Powermac G5 here.. kudos to you bro, still got the spirit for the old gem.
i have completely forgot Panther tho, coz i am now in Leopard.
Hope someone in here can you help you with this

 

you must be very careful with this firmware stuff, as there is a lot of stuff around which is only half working and originates from some hong kong pirates who do not care about the details (as well as the ownership)

many cards around are rebrands of "orignals" and might have the same chipset but they still can differ when it comes to registers or some magic numbers and then they dont fully work.

my general advice would be... for Mac OS9: only use the 3-4 models out there which natively supported it, for OSX-only: better look for a PCI-X model, there seems to be more on the market than for PCI, but take care as some of them could require 10.5 or higher OS.


if it also doenst work with an alternative drive, then maybe macos9lives.com is the right place for you.

the person who wrote all the mac releated ide and sata firmware for 30 years is a member of the team there and while he is currently unavailable, he is still working on making more cheap genereic cards available for all the different obsolete OSX versions. (with 10.4.x and OS9 as final aim)

if you dont get it to work and if you will not need more than 2 disks of that small size, you can also use most of the 3,95 cable adapters.

in a quicksilver 2 of these cheapo adapters will work out of the box, on MDD machines you would need one of them to be a better 12 euro card which allows to switch it to "master mode" (mostly startech branded)

as you probably know, converting SATA from IDE in a 733 will not break the size limit barrier of its IDE controller - but then you at least know that the disk is okay and gain some more speed, i.e. up to 95/95 with SSDs. (SATA disks at around 500gb or more will give you that, too)

via PCI you can use - without dangerous extra tricks - up to 2 TB both, disk and partition size, then. (i am not sure if 10.5 can do 3, i think that was 10.6)

however, the first thing i strongly recommend here is to upgrade to 10.4.11.

there is no danmed reason to use that crappy 10.3 system and eventually this is even the cause for the card not working. any supported card with proper firmware will work plug and play, including boot and sleep.

 

...is there a switch on the card for "raid mode"?

 

RAID Mode ?

Dunno ...

How to find out ?

 

There is a two pin switch on the card (don't know if, that's a RAID - mode selector .) .
Whatsoever ... I removed the jumper and powered up the machine again .
No difference in operation (no disk found .)

I've attached the system profiler page as a *.pdf - file

 

ok. it really could have been and i would wished you that it only was a wrong jumper setting.

 

but it looks like the card is okay.

do you attempt to boot from it? if yes, boot from elsewhere (DVD if you got one). if no, see if it will work with another disk later.