Best PCI Upgrades for a PowerMac G4

[macintolli]

Hello,
one question regarding FW800 cards: you cannot boot off such a card, right?
(in this case, the lacie fw800 or the sonnet allegro fw800).
Thank you

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

You should be able to boot from FW400 or 800 PCI. I have a few installed in my Powermac g4s and the FW drive connected to them is seen as a boot option just fine in boot picker.

 

[joevt]

FireWire and USB booting requires Power Mac G4 (AGP Graphics) Sawtooth or later with Open Firmware 3.2.4f1 (02/18/00) or later (according to the set of firmwares I have, which is probably not all of them). Back-porting FireWire and USB booting to earlier Macs would be an interesting project...

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Specifically, I can confirm that my FW drives are not viewable in bootpicker 10.4.11 on my Powermac G3 B&W. Conversely, they are viewable with my 2001 dual 1Ghz QS, 2002 dual 800mhz MMD and dual 450mhz 2000 Gigabit Graphite PMG4, so all of the G4 Powermacs that I own, both fw400 and fw800 are bootable. I do not own an AGP Graphite PMG4, so cannot test that unfortunately. Naturally this trend continues into my PMG5s and EI Macs as well.

 

[joevt]

Naturally this trend continues into my PMG5s and EI Macs as well.

But a strange thing happens after 04/06/04 and before 08/25/04 where Open Firmware 4.8.7f1 and later (for 32-bit Macs) and 5.1.7f1 and later (for 64-bit Macs) where Apple disables USB booting which requires a small nvramrc patch to re-enable.

There's a "List of Open Firmware versions" at https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...l-work-in-a-beige-power-macintosh-g3.2303689/
The list shows which firmware versions I've examined. I am looking for any that are not in that list.

That post also explains that you can use PCIe cards with old Power Macs using a PCI to PCIe adapter so you can use graphics cards meant for the latest Power Mac G5. However, it's difficult to get adapters that are better than PCI 32-bit 33 MHz (or 66 MHz?) so you can't use a PCI-X or AGP slot at full speed. Someone needs to work on that so we can get more than 1 Gbps from USB 3.x or NVMe cards

 

[macintolli]

You should be able to boot from FW400 or 800 PCI. I have a few installed in my Powermac g4s and the FW drive connected to them is seen as a boot option just fine in boot picker.

Unfortunately, it doesnt work here (G4 digital audio, sonnet FW800 PCI card). External HDD via FW800 or 400.
Mac OS 10.4.11 let me choose the drive for booting. But after restart, the screen stays grey,
turns into black and grey again.. no boot
Connected to the Mac's motherboard FW port, however, it boots just fine.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

That is weird. I don’t have a sonnet FW800 card but I do have a Sonnet FW400 pci card and my g4s boots fine from that card. The FW800 cards I’m using are Siig and Ultra branded. I’m very surprised that Sonnet would produce a PCI card that would not be bootable in your Powermac g4.

I wonder if you need to update your firmware to 3.2.4f1 or later as joevt spoke to. Still your internal FW works, so sounds like that is ok.

 

[joevt]

Unfortunately, it doesnt work here (G4 digital audio, sonnet FW800 PCI card). External HDD via FW800 or 400.
Mac OS 10.14.11 let me choose the drive for booting. But after restart, the screen stays grey,
turns into black and grey again.. no boot
Connected to the Mac's motherboard FW port, however, it boots just fine.

Digital Audio may have Open Firmware 4.1.0f1 from 2000/12/04.

You should probably have Open Firmware 4.2.8f1 from 2001/10/11 which is a firmware updater that is also used by AGP Graphics (Sawtooth) and Gigabit Ethernet.

Boot into Open Firmware and compare the properties of the built-in FW with the Sonnet FW800 card. Use telnet in Open Firmware and do a dump-device-tree.

The Open Firmware FireWire driver matches against PCI devices with class code 0C:00:10 which is Serial:FireWire:OHCI
If the Sonnet has class code 0C:00:00 (Serial:FireWire:Generic) then it won't boot unless it has a PCI option rom with Open Firmware fcode (unlikely).
I wonder if any FireWire 800 controller cards had PCI class code 0C:00:00.

Actually, Open Firmware 3.3.2f1, 3.2.4f1, and 4.1.0f1 has a second separate FireWire driver for a PCI device with vendor/product ID 104c:8000 (PCILynx/PCILynx2 IEEE 1394 Link Layer Controller). The driver says it's compatible with class code 0C:00:00 but is only applied to PCI device 104c:8000. 104c:8000 happens to be the same FireWire controller used in my B&W G3 (which doesn't have a Open Firmware FireWire driver).

You can try the multi-boot command to see if Open Firmware scans your firewire device. You may need to set some flags to get a progress report.
https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/interesting-find-on-pci-bus-booting-nwms.49225/post-553507
https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?thr...om-usb-from-the-boot-picker.48601/post-546120
https://tinkerdifferent.com/threads/blue-and-white-scsi-2-drive-issues.4076/post-34670

 

[macintolli]

Thanks. The frustration made me putting the g4 away for now, but
I will try in a while. Meanwhile, I bought a different fw800 card, just
in case and to have options/test against the other...
Also, I will then open a new thread as this already doesn't belong here...