Sonnet G4 and PCI Combo Firewire & USB2 |
August, 21, 2003 2:35 AM |
jeanferdinandsusini |
Hello, First of all, as I saw there's no find tool, it has been already discussed on the forum but at least a digest page with known problems and solutions would be great. BTW, I have a PM 8600/200 which has worked slowly but robustly under OSX 10.1.5 for about 1 year. Cool ! But so slow. About at the begining of the year I bought a Sonnet G4/800 upgrade card to get more speed and some of the cool features of OSX 10.2. After looking for some time on a problem I had, I found that I had to put my internal drive (2GB) on the slow SCSI internal connector (5 MB/s) in order to boot OSX 10.2 (other drives connected to the 10 MB/s bus are then mounted properly). I don't understand what's the problem here but it works. Now my problem is that I had bought a PCI combo Firewire-USB2 and plugged it in my box. For some time now the USB worked great (mouse, wirelesss keyboard, tablet, scanner, printer ...), I don't have tested USB2 (I don't have such devices). And recently I bought a 80GB firewire harddrive... The problem is that the drive seems to work well with OS9 even OS9.2 (using patched Firewire driver of OS9Helper) but under OSX it freezes my computer. This behavior is not deterministic: in my last experiences, I would be able to mount the Firwire drive, share it by AFS copy some file on it through the network, and then the system froze when I try to copy a file locally. Now the system froze every time I try to mount the disk. I also tried to use a Firewire CD-R/RW and after mounting a CD it froze after a little time of use. It had also frozen while burning a CD-R. The problem also appeared trying to plug an iSight to the Firewire bus. Is it a known problem ? Is there the same problem that the one of OS9 with patched Firewire driver ? Is there a solution ? I hope to find a solution I bought the Firewire hard drive when I know that XPF 3 would support Firewire boot. Thanks in advance for your help. |
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RE: Sonnet G4 and PCI Combo Firewire & USB2 |
August, 30, 2003 8:51 PM |
w18593323 |
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I have used a TI chipset on a 8500/g4 800 with very bad result when connected to my video camera. On Wintel, the TI is considered the best chipset. Does any one have a recomendation about a card to use with no problem, or what is the best chipset. But, the problem may not be on the Firewire chipset by itself. All the 8xxx/9xxx mac use a single pci to pci bridge. Maybe the machine is running out of bandwidth (specially with a video card). Probably a s900 with dual pcp to pci bridges and EDO support will be a much better system to run, with extra memory bandwidth. |
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RE: Sonnet G4 and PCI Combo Firewire & USB2 |
August, 30, 2003 1:58 PM |
jeanferdinandsusini |
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I don't have yet contacted Sonnet about this problem, but I 'm not sure they have a good support for OSX on old PCI PowerMac. They don't find a solution for me while trying to install OSX on my mac after upgrade with the G4, so ... I will try to ask them eventually or to ask ADAPTEC. Ok now what I understand of the problem is that a kernel task seems to hang while copying data from a CD to the HD through the FireWire bus. If the application that start the copy is the Finder, the whole system freezes. I think the problem is in the Firewire driver. I never get a kernel panic, in fact the system freeze but that doesn't mean that it has crashed. I 'm not sure if my understanding here is good, but I think a wrong behavior of the FW driver talking to the FW controller could lead to a lock in a kernel task when interrupts are hidden and may produce a lock of the whole system. Firewire support is part of the Darwin project so I'm wondering if I can dive into the source code of it and try to experiment and trace the problem. I have no experience in OS coding so it would be probably not so easy. If someone could give me some hints for a quick start, it will be helpful. |
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RE: Sonnet G4 and PCI Combo Firewire & USB2 |
August, 30, 2003 8:12 AM |
esmith |
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Does Sonnet know about this problem? |
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RE: Sonnet G4 and PCI Combo Firewire & USB2 |
August, 30, 2003 8:10 AM |
esmith |
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Is the timing issue only with combo cards or with any firewire card? |
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RE: Sonnet G4 and PCI Combo Firewire & USB2 |
August, 30, 2003 6:04 AM |
jeanferdinandsusini |
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Ok, I also agree that the processor (G4 800MHz Crescendo) is part of the problem I have already used the card with the 604e/200 with no problem... That's why I'm thinking of a timing issue due to the faster processor. And in OS9 the problem is a timing problem. |
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RE: Sonnet G4 and PCI Combo Firewire & USB2 |
August, 30, 2003 12:14 AM |
esmith |
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I have determined that there is a direct conflict albeit only in OS 9 with the Sonnet 800 and Video Cams and Combo cards and certain software programs. I swapped a 500 G3 into my 9600 and the camera worked. Replaced the 800 and it crashed. I am going to get a firewire only and USB only board to test this theory. Any similar experiences? |
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RE: Sonnet G4 and PCI Combo Firewire & USB2 |
August, 29, 2003 4:24 PM |
jseibyl |
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my macalley firewire/usb 2 combo works great. Of course not getting 2.0 speed in os 9.......and had to putz with the 2.0 drivers in X, but never had a problem with the DVD burner on the firewire. |
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RE: Sonnet G4 and PCI Combo Firewire & USB2 |
August, 29, 2003 4:20 PM |
marcush |
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I have heard that the Belkin cards work but the only vendor I can personally recommend is Ratoc. My card is rock solid. |
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RE: Sonnet G4 and PCI Combo Firewire & USB2 |
August, 29, 2003 2:53 PM |
esmith |
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OK... So what combo board does one buy??? At Compusa they have: 1. Belkin F5U508 2. Adaptec Duoconnect |
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RE: Sonnet G4 and PCI Combo Firewire & USB2 |
August, 28, 2003 2:05 PM |
marcush |
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Given my own experience with 3 different cards I think the problem comes down to how a given manufacturer inplements firewire in their cards. That is why some cards work well and others just barely or not at all. The CompUSA card I have has a Lucent firewire chip while the Datatek card had a TI firewire chip. Both were equally bad. Copies to a firewire hard drive would always hang. Copying from the drive usually worked, ableit very slowly. |
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RE: Sonnet G4 and PCI Combo Firewire & USB2 |
August, 28, 2003 8:11 AM |
jseibyl |
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I believe you are correct about the timing issues. I have to clock down the burn speed on my external CD burner, but that is because it is on the slower scsi bus. Perhaps if you shuffle the card to another pci slot?? I have not seen that on this thread yet, you probally did that already. OShelper does have a patch for firewire timing on old world machines. I ALWAYS run it if I work on a machine, so not sure what the behaviors would be without it. It fixes a.....timing issue. Just checked Adaptec, and noticed some oddball things about that card....no BnW support? support for beige g3 and higher?? weird.... Macintosh Power Macintosh beige G3 (rev B or later) & G4s (No Blue & White G3 support) Mac® OS 9.0.4 or later* Available PCI slot CD-ROM drive *This card is OHCI compatible. Drivers that Apple includes in the Mac OS will work with this product. Note: USB ports will function at USB 1.1 speeds. |
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RE: Sonnet G4 and PCI Combo Firewire & USB2 |
August, 28, 2003 4:27 AM |
jeanferdinandsusini |
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Ok the ADAPTEC Duo Connect combo FW/USB2 has HiNT PCI bridge, TI chip for FW and Nec for USB2, I have also tried another PCI card combo FW/USB-1 with Lucent chipset for USB-1 and Firewire and TI chip for the PCI bridge. No better result with Firewire. In fact I have more interesting results here. The whole system seems to freeze only when I try to copy a file in the Finder locally. I have made many test trying to copy files from a CDRom to my home directory using the cp command in the terminal and the copy starts... then after a few seconds it stops I cannot even kill it with 'kill -9'. If I shutdown the Firewire device, I get a message that inform me that the Firewire device has not been unmounted properly. cp is then stopped with a lot of error messages... The copy never hangs at the same moment so it sounds like a timing problem between FW controller and the system driver (as I understand such a problem exists on OS9 and OS9Helper provide a patched version of Firewire drivers). As I recall that the problem seems to appear since I have put the new Sonnet Crescendo G4/800 in my system. I have already used (very slowly) the Firewire CD-Rom with the original CPU (604e / 200 MHz) as I remember (I cannot switch back to the 604e to confirm that at that time). As I found a way to exhibit the problem without crashing the whole system, I am interested to know how I can debug the execution of a driver in OSX. Are the Firewire drivers parts of the Darwin distribution ? Does anyone here have informations or hints to share with me on that? Thanks, |
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RE: Sonnet G4 and PCI Combo Firewire & USB2 |
August, 27, 2003 1:18 PM |
marcush |
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Oops, I misread your machine type. It's an 8600 not a 9500. I am certain that the card is the problem though. My Ratoc combo card has a TI firewire chip and an NEC chip for USB. I have not seen anybody specifically mention this but maybe the PCI-PCI bridge chip also plays a role in compatability. The chip on my card is made by HiNT. I have not attempted to enable USB2 because I don't have any devices to use it with yet. |
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RE: Sonnet G4 and PCI Combo Firewire & USB2 |
August, 27, 2003 7:45 AM |
jeanferdinandsusini |
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After trying many things that has been suggested here and after reading a lot on this forum (thanks to the great search engine ;-) ). Here are my conclusions : I have successfully boot MacOS X 10.2.6 on my internal drive (9 GB, IBM DNES- 309170) on the fast SCSI (10 MB/s) by disabling "attention unit" (according to infos on http://www.hgst.com/hdd/support/dnes/dnesjum.htm) and SCSI ID->0 (don't really know if it is necessary). I kept the original drive on the slow SCSI chain (5 MB/s), as it is slow (3-4 MB/s in read/write tested on the fast SCSI) it make me able to get more efficient configuration without saturating too much the 2 SCSI chains. Thanks to all for their help and for the information I can found on this forum. Now I can boot my PM8600/200 with Sonnet Crescendo G4/800 without needing to use the throttle menu in XPF (2.2.5). I use an ATI 7000 PCI (32Mo) as primary and unique video output. QuartzExtrem enabled with some success. I get the better processor performances by running Sonnet X Tune up 1.2.7 after installation of OSX using XPost Facto. The L2CacheConfig utility gives me bad results (cache is not well recognized and configured). Now for the problem of the Adaptec Duo Connect PCI card... Things don't runs as good. I have tried to install various USB2 drivers for the card. But I cannot test if I really get USB 2 at full speed as I don't have USB 2 compliant devices. But I have still the problem with Firewire. This card use Texas Instrument chip set for FW (but perhaps some ADAPTEC additions). I cannot find any driver for FW support in MacOS X. And TI chip set is known to be the chip set of choice for FW on OS, so ... I have tried many things as moving the PCI card on other slots, plugged in the internal power supply connector even if my FW devices are self powered... no better results. I have finally heavily crashed my external FW Hard Disk so now I 'm doing my test with a CD Burner acting as a CD-Rom reader. And I still get freeze of the system while trying to copy files form the CD to my home folder... But I can start read a movie stored on a CD-Rom using Quicktime player. After a few seconds reading the movie QTPlayer freeze but often not the whole system (only the second time I try to play the movie after shutting down the CD burner and switching it on again, the whole system freeze). I don't know if those information could be of any help for any one, ... I 'm thinking that the adaptec duo connect is a wrong choice for upgraded old PowerMac under OS X. If people around have better results, let me know. I have also tried using a card made for PC which is a combo USB 1, FW using lucent chip set and got the same results. For me, it seems that there is a synchronization problem between the FW controller and the Mac. Perhaps something similar to what appear on OS9 with OS9Helper patching FW drivers to fix timing issues... Don't really no. The fact remains that people has good results using Combo card (probably not ADAPTEC ones) but it doesn't work on my system . Is the RAM configuration could influence the result ? ... Don't know. Thanks again |
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RE: Sonnet G4 and PCI Combo Firewire & USB2 |
August, 22, 2003 6:40 PM |
egonzales21 |
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Have a 9600 with Sonnet G4 800 I had similar problems trying to use an Orange Micro Firewire/USB 1.1 card. The firewire was stable in 9 but always crashed in 10. Currently using an Adaptec FireConnect 4300 card in Slot 2 without problems. Use a CD burner and Seagate Hard Drive, both in ADS Pyro cases using Oxford 911 chipset. I chose the Adaptec card because of the TI chipset. According to ADS, their Oxford chipset works best with the TI chipset because their bridge is almost made by TI. By the way I settle for a separate USB 1.1 card currently in Slot 3. Have not had the need to upgrade to 2.0 since Firewire works for me. Ed |
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RE: Sonnet G4 and PCI Combo Firewire & USB2 |
August, 22, 2003 1:11 PM |
marcush |
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I have a Power Tower Pro 225 with Sonnet G4/800 processor. The PTP is basically a 9500 so we have for all intents and purposes identical system. For the last year I have had a pefectly functional Ratoc Firewire/USB2.0 card installed in my machine. It is in slot two right after my Sonnet Tempo ATA/100 card. I tested it in all of the PCI slots and found that it did not work well in the lower 3 and worked best in slots 2 and 3. You don't say where your card is seated so you might try moving it around. Now for the bad news. You may have to try different cards before you get one that works well. I tried a CompUSA Firewire/USB1.1 card and a Datatek Firewire/USB1.1 card before I got to the Ratoc card. I had the same symptoms you are experiencing. They worked in OS 9.x., albeit slowly, but bombed in OSX when I tried copying files. Most of the time I could copy from a Firewire drive but as soon as I tried to copy to it the system would freeze. |
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RE: Sonnet G4 and PCI Combo Firewire & USB2 |
August, 22, 2003 12:37 PM |
jeanferdinandsusini |
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No the problem is with normal files opération on the disk under OS X leads to freeze. I have also tried with a Firewire CD-Burner and an iSight and OSX freeze also with that two other devices. I have tested the hard disk and the CD Burner under OS9.2.2 and all is fine. I have taken the example of the movie just to illustrate. I get the same result trying to read any file on that disk. |
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RE: Sonnet G4 and PCI Combo Firewire & USB2 |
August, 22, 2003 11:59 AM |
jseibyl |
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I know there are utils for more detailed sys specs, but I stick to ASP, and Bench X, so sorry I can't give info on that, I am sure others out there do...... I FINALLY tightened up the screws on the case of my 9500, the small yet significant moment where stability is declared and band-aids put away.... :-) |
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RE: Sonnet G4 and PCI Combo Firewire & USB2 |
August, 22, 2003 11:49 AM |
jseibyl |
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"(for example start playing a movie that perfectly works on OS9.2.2)" I have to ask.... does the drive function for just normal file operations?? ie moving data. Because you mention video here, a red flag is going off in my mind with regard to quartz, the video subsystem on X. I am not going to say much right now, but that might have something to do with your bomb, and possibly not the firewire drive at all. Another question...do you have other firewire devices to plug in?? I don't have enough info just yet, so I will reserve any info for now. Do you have info regarding the data stream of the video you are trying to view?? |
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RE: Sonnet G4 and PCI Combo Firewire & USB2 |
August, 22, 2003 10:20 AM |
jeanferdinandsusini |
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Thanks for all these comments. But 'till now I didn't find any drivers for the Firewire part of the card. All companies say that on OSX no drivers are required but the Apple ones. And indeed, it seems to work partially. But it froze quickly after mounting drives. In addition I have tested it with the original 604e processor and OSX 10.1.5 and it seems to work (at least The system doesn't freeze after some testing as it did in OSX 10.2.6 and Sonnet G4/800). In addition firewire run perfectly on OS9.2.2 G4/ 800. I have tried Orange Micro driver and it changes the way the card is reported in the Apple System Profiler but the problem remains after reding a few data on the disk (for example start playing a movie that perfectly works on OS9.2.2) the system freeze. => cold reboot. Do you know of a tool to have complete and detailled report on Macintosh hardware : Apple System Profiler is not enough for me (memory configuration is not even reported). |
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RE: Sonnet G4 and PCI Combo Firewire & USB2 |
August, 21, 2003 10:22 AM |
jseibyl |
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Ah.....Adaptec they claim their stuff just works.....wish it were true. The only reason we have made suggestions regarding drivers ris the the actual chipset is made by NEC, TI, whoever. Adaptec told me that I couldn't run a flashed Wintel 2940 card....I have done it to 3 of them with great results in X(which is not supposed to run that card either). Sometimes it is best to go to the actual manufac of the chipset, as there might be something in a driver, enabler, extension, etc needed that the OEM company does not either support nor have an knoweledge of..... In my own experience most stuff did work, the Macally card required drivers which I installed no prob, but I still couldn't get 2.0 speed from my vixvue digital album, esentially an ipod for photographers (20 gig hard-drive). After some help from voxdigital I figured I would try another driver, as the actual chipsets of these cards is pretty much the same, so perhaps another driver might work.....It did. The scsi stuff I can help you with, but it does require some more info, if you like, email me at jseibyl@plansoft.com, and I can go into more detail there......... |
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PCI Combo Firewire & USB2 voxxdigital |
August, 21, 2003 10:07 AM |
jseibyl |
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and thanks once again....OrangeMicro driver worked for me!!!!! :-) |
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RE: Sonnet G4 and PCI Combo Firewire & USB2 |
August, 21, 2003 9:48 AM |
jeanferdinandsusini |
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Looking the card I can see TI and Nec chips on it. And yes there is an internal power connector, I don't have plugged power because my HD is self powered, but ... The card seems to work perfectly to me under OS9. I have used my FW HardDisk for a long. I don't have experienced frequent crashes especially since I have updated the Firewire driver using OS9Helper. It works perhaps not at full speed but it works. On OSX it is another story. OSX runs like a champ for hours and hours, I just had one kernel panic while trying to use PowerLogic CPUDirector on it. I have stopped that experiment. So every thing is ok PCIExtrem runs on my Radeon sothe overall system is pretty usable. I can use my USB scanner, print document or photos. play iTunes 4. Surf with Safari, use eMail... every thing is ok but the known problem for the sound output and input and I cannot make my system go to sleep mode. I run into real problems for me when I try to use my Firewire HD or any Firewire device (CD-Rom burner, iSight, ...). Some times the HD is usable for a very short time and then the system freeze, but some times the system freeze while mounting the drive. You talk about a driver but adaptec claims that no driver is required for Mac the card is supported by MacOS and MacOS X out of the box, do I realy need drivers ? ---- Concerning the SCSI configuration, I have tried many things: If I put all the SCSI chaine on the slow SCSI bus every thing runs well, but it 's slower so. If let the startup drive (2GB) alone on the fastSCSI chain and the rest of my equipment on the slow one it doesn't boot. I don't understand what's the hell here but I have now a configuration that runs ... so . I have deported may User account onto the HD on the fast SCSI chain as well as the /Applications folder the /Library folder /usr and the swap so many things in my systems take advantage on the faster internal SCSI bus ;-). But I 'm still interseting by being able to boot directly on the fast SCSI chain but don't understand how. I don't know how to disable unit attention on my disks. I 'm not so familiar with hardware... Thanks for help. |
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RE: Sonnet G4 and PCI Combo Firewire & USB2 |
August, 21, 2003 9:41 AM |
voxxdigital |
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Hmmm... I have a Firewire/USB-2 combo PCI card in my Powere Mac 9600, running OSX 10.2.6 on a Sonnet G3/400. I actually didn't had the chance of testing the Firewire interface, but in the verbose boot it seems to be recognized. The Firewire have a "Agere" chipset and the USB-2 has a NEC chipset. After almost ripping out all my hair, I got the USB-2 working at full speed - I found the right driver. I sent it via e-mail to jseibyl, if you want me to send it to you, drop me an e-mail. One important observation: like your Firewire drive, my USB-2 hard drive mounted in the Jaguar's desktop with the built-in drivers, but at any attempt to read/write it hard crashed my Mac. I then installed the NEC USB-2 drivers, an all I got was a crash in high-speed. So, I figured that in my case, I needed an USB-to-IDE driver, which I use in OS9. Then I finally found in the net the USB-to-IDE driver for my Genesys Logic USB-to-IDE bridge. Presto! everything works now. The only drawback is that I have to power the USB drive after the boot finished and all drives are mounted, otherwise it crashes. But powering the drive after boot, that's a full go. If I were you I'd do what I did in my USB case - do a thorough search in the internet using Yahoo, Google, etc, for the words firewire+driver+dowload+"hard disk"+"mac os x". Use advanced search. |
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