SoftRaid driver dilemma |
March, 06, 2003 4:18 PM |
williamrah |
I posted this in an older thread with no response,so I thought I'd try a new thread.(8500 successfully running 10.2.4 via EPF). I just spent the better part of today attempting to get a raid case and an internal UW drive running on a couple of ATTO PSC PSI cards I purchased on ebay. I managed to flash the firmware on both cards to 1.6.6, after doing the apple/ATTO hack on one of them .The other was an ATTO retail version. I can see both cards with proper firmware installed in apple system profiler, but all kinds of hell breaks loose when I attempt to attach a drive to either of the cards(blank screen, etc.) The 8500 seems to not want both cards in PCI slots simultaneously, but even with a single card, the drives won't come up. I thought it might have been a hard disk driver problem. My wide drives all have SoftRaid drivers and I've tried to reformat with drive setup(OS 9.2), FWB HDToolkit, and HDST(3.5). Nothing will allow me to take over the SoftRaid drivers or reformat the drives. I finally got the internal SE wide drive to mount using the Disk Warrior startup CD to boot into 9.1, and show up in the ATTO utility for OSX, but never saw thr Raid volume on the external connector of the ATTO card. I got a message in HDST that there was a program in use on the SE wide drive (which I had just reformatted in SoftRaid). It seems like I'm locked into SoftRaid permanently and they don't have anOSx compatabilityupgrade yet. As for the ATTO cards, they appear to be useless in my 8500 running between 9.2 and 10.2.4. I can't even get them to work with a 9.2 startup drive. I have my old Miles UW coming back in a day or so in a version which is OSX upgradable. Now I'm afraid to possibly ruin the OS9 functionality of that card by flashing the ROM for use. Anyone have any thoughts on this? Thanks |
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RE: SoftRaid driver dilemma |
March, 08, 2003 10:06 AM |
williamrah |
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thanks, jslewis You're right on target about the 2 ATTO card thing...the 8500 won't run 2 for me.....don't know why I even tried...guess it was because I bid on 2 at ebay and unfortunately won both auctions. here's the hack link: http://www.os9forever.com/SCSICard.html Thanks for the advice on using X's Disk utility....I was about to start a thread on recommendations for RAID software under these conditions...looks like I will be able to use RAID only on X...for now |
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RE: SoftRaid driver dilemma |
March, 08, 2003 2:43 AM |
jslewis |
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OSX's Disk utility should be able to see the drives (not nessacerally the volumes) if they were plugged in and powered on during startup. It's much more accepting of drives than drive setup. The erase and partition command can install the old fashoned sort of disk driver on the boot bloocks. I am curious as to quite a few things. Why two cards? The 8500 has serious PCI limitations, using two SCSI cards does not give you better throughput. OS9 relies on SCSI manager 4.3 routines built into rom. While it's extreamly flexible I've found that adding two or more SCSI (or fake SCSI ide card sort of things) buses via PCI cards cand really confuse the SCSI manager. It's already managing the two builtin SCSI buses. OSX does not use the old SCSI manager and is more accepting of multiple SCSI cards however as you know some older SCSI devices just aren't supported and all SCSI devices have to be powered on and plugged in booting OSX as there is no SCSI Probe... I have the apple OEM PSC card flashed with apple firmware from around the time of the OSX preview. What is this ATTO/Apple firmware hack you speak of??? I know what driver hell can be from the earliest days of OSX and again recomend Disk Utility to setup the drive. I recomend Disk Utility to setup the raid too if it's only going to be used under OSX. |
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RE: SoftRaid driver dilemma |
March, 08, 2003 12:43 AM |
williamrah |
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Just for the record...I got the ATTO card working fine with all of the wide drives. I had changed the SCSI ID on the SE internal and it was in conflict with one of the drives in the external RAID case. ...... The problem with reformatting the drives with HDST to eliminate the OSX unfriendly SoftRaid drivers was simple. I had virtual memory on from a default install of OS9.1 and kept getting the message in HDST that I couldn't update drivers or reformat "because some program was running on the disk....found this in the HDST help......turned off virtual memory and bingo....silly me.. Still tricky to use drive setup on even supported drives with SoftRaid drivers. SoftRaid tech support admitted there's a bug with drive setup here. Thanks mjoecups for getting me back on the right track..... |
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RE: SoftRaid driver dilemma |
March, 06, 2003 4:50 PM |
mjoecups358 |
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Boot into 9.1, then hook the wide/softraid formatted drives up and run drive setup. If the drives are supported you will be able to format them. If there not, you need to use Intechs formatter. Good Luck, Marty PS I use the ATTO Express PCI PSC as my boot device here and it's rock solid. |
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