How to fix the 8GB limit on ATA PCI cards? |
December, 21, 2002 3:17 PM |
brfransen |
The 8GB limit requires that OS X be installed on a partition that resides entirely within the first 8GB of an ATA drive that is connected to an ATA PCI card that appears in X as an ATA bus. Therefore, if you use SCSI drives you will not run into this problem. Also, if your ATA PCI card appears in X as a SCSI bus (Sonnet Tempo ATA/66) you will not experience this problem. Apple has documented that this problem affects the PowerBook G3 Series that does not have USB, the Beige G3 and an Rev. A through Rev. D iMac and However, I have never seen anywhere what Apple says is the cause of the problem, only how to work around the problem. Ryan has said that this problem is a bug in the built-in ATA controller's firmware of the above mentioned supported machines and should not affect our unsupported machines since they do not have built-in ATA controllers. The PCI ATA controllers have their own firmware which should not have the bug which requires the 8GB limit. So what needs to be done to allow OS X to be installed anywhere on ATA drives connected to ATA PCI controllers? I think that first it needs to be confirmed that PCI ATA controllers do not contain the same bug. Logically it would seem that they wouldn't have the bug due to the fact that they work in later supported G3 & G4 machines without any limitations. Next, I think that Installer.app would have to be hacked to allow X to be installed onto an ATA drive. Since I am not a programmer (I have dabbled some but I know very little) I don't know how difficult this would be. My guess is that Installer.app is somehow determining what machine it is running on and allowing or disallowing X to be installed based on that. So if Installer.app could be fooled into thinking that it was being installed on a B&W G3 it would allow X to be installed on a partition larger than 8GB. This is just a thought that may or may not work. I am sure that there is a much more elegant solution out there. So if you have one throw it out! I am hoping that this will start a dialog that will eventually lead to a solution for this problem. Britney |
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RE: How to fix the 8GB limit on ATA PCI cards? |
December, 26, 2002 8:44 PM |
OSXGuru |
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The biggest problem would be getting the Installer.app to allow the installation. I suppose that one could write it up as a bug and see whether Apple would fix it. |
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RE: How to fix the 8GB limit on ATA PCI cards? |
December, 23, 2002 7:19 PM |
marcush |
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I just tested this problem of sorts. I just got a Sonnet Tempo ATA/100 card to replace my Acard ATA/100 this past weekend. I replaced it because the Sonnet card properly see's my HD's and my Pioneer DVD burner as ATA and ATAPI devices respectively. This now allows me to use iDVD with this machine. I was able to install the 10.2.3 Combo updater onto a 20GB OSX partition with no problems at all. Normally, if you were going to be affected by this problem your target partition would appear greyed out in the installer app. I believe you are correct about the card's firmware not having the 8GB bug. |