Internal SCSI Hard Disk in a blue G3 works in 9 but not X

adambyte

adambyte

Registered
Help my dad switch to OS X.

This blue and white Power Mac G3 not only came with the regular 12GB ATA hard disk inside, but also came with a SCSI PCI card, which hooks up to another 24GB internal IBM hard disk. However, although the drive is seen just fine in 9, it refuses to show up on Mac OS X's desktop, in the Disk Utility, or in the Apple System Profiler. Help please!
 
Welcome to the club. I'm no mac guru but I've just about given up on my B&W G3, SCSI and OSX. If someone has solutions, then that would be great. I'd love to hear it too :)
 
Try going to your SCSI card's manufacturer's web site and looking for OS X firmware updates, drivers, or similar software. My mother's Quicksilver G4 had a similar problem, and a poorly-designed firmware upgrade from Orange Micro solved it. If that fails, tell us who made your SCSI card and hope that someone with specific experience speaks up.
 
Okay, I'm not quite sure if it's SCSI or IDE or what...
Written on the card or its chips:

PCI Ultra IDE
PCI Master

TurboMaxATA33

ACARD
ATP850UF-C

I went over to http://www.acard.com , but I don't think any of the drivers are for this card... anybody? Beuler?... Beuler?

btw, this is the most hardware-sy thing I've ever tried to solve. What a pain in the butt.
 
I hate to have to say this, but you might just want to give up on SCSI and get another IDE hard drive. They are so amazingly cheap, you could get an 80GB drive for under $100 and put it in beside your current 12GB drive.

Chris
 
Alright, well, I have emailed them. Thanks for enlightening me. Hopefully they have some sort of solution.

Okay, so I was stupid, this is an IDE card... meaning that the hard disk hooked up to it is ATA... isn't there already circuitry in the PowerMac G3 to handle a second HD? Why was this second card added by the people who sold this to us?
 
people use PCI base ATA cards as the controller for the second disk drive for increased performance thru inhanced buffering and the addition of the second bus. Not to mention that multiple drives can be installed on the card supporting some types of primitive RAID; level 1 or 2. Not to say that your card can do it.
 
Okay, so I was stupid, this is an IDE card... meaning that the hard disk hooked up to it is ATA... isn't there already circuitry in the PowerMac G3 to handle a second HD? Why was this second card added by the people who sold this to us? [/B]
Click to expand...

This is probably a Rev 1 B&W which has HD corruption issues with slave drives. Even non OEM drives set as master on Rev 1 mobos have corruption issues.

You also said that the HD was recognized in 9 but not X. This may be a dumb question but, are you sure that the drive is in HFS+ format; not standard HFS?
 
Not dumb at all. I had to reformat both drives as HFS+ when I realized that Mac OS X is not very HFS friendly. Wish it were as simple as that.
 
Thanks for pointing me in the right direction... unfortunately, that FTP site doesn't work any more... and after a bit of searching around, I found out that this card simply is NOT OS X compatible, as seen on this web page... http://promax.com/tech_support/

"All current ProMax products are compatible with MacOS X. TurboMax ATA-33 is not compatible with OSX"

Oh well.
 
Big bummer. Now the question is, do they have a ProMax card for your machine. Would you want to upgrade the Turbo card to the Pro so you can use the other drive?
 
Well, I don't think my father really wants to invest much more money into this thing. I'm just trying to figure out how to keep things going on the cheap.... but unless someone has a bright idea, he might just have to boot in 9 to use it for video/sound editing and backups.

*shrugs* Maybe I'll find a compatible card cheap on eBay or something
 
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