7500 + mucho upgrades & still (some) headaches... |
October, 17, 2002 7:11 PM |
p.de.haan2 |
OK.. here's the beef... I'm running a PowerMac 7500 which has been remodelled with a case-conversion (www.xlr8yourmac.com has the story.. ;-)) My machie currently has: 512 MB RAM (upgrade THNX to OWC nice price...) G3@490 MHz (G3/533 on a 49 MHz bus) ATTO US$29 card (this one runs like TNT on MacOS 9.1...!!!! Get one!!!) 2xUSB/2xFireWire combo card - no probs whatsoever in either OS... Brandname?? I don't know!!! ATI Radeon PCI edition (32 MB) 1x Seagate Atlas V 18GB IBM DPSS 18GB IBM DORS 2GB (Nostalgia??) BTW.. PCI Extreme (versiontracker.com) adds a lot of fun (snappy!!!) to the experience! Get 1 2 ! OK.. now here's the beef... Half a year back i discovered I DO need a dual-monitor setup to get a working install of MacOS X 10.1 (do not even try to do without...!!!) This month I installed Jaguar over a fresh install of 10.1.. is works nicely... BUT it absolutely needs to boot from the internal (SCSI-2) bus in order to operate. Trying to boot it from the (fast & speedy) ATTO card is a no-go... the system thinks it over and finally decides to reboot in OS 9 (!@#$!!%%!^&!!!**) Grrrrmmmmbblllll. If only.. But a nice touch... The Atlas V is the only disk OSX 10.1 wanted to install on... Moving it from the internal SCSI-2 to the ATTO (UW-160 @ US$29 => eshop.macsales.com) card resulted in a no-boot... :-( Since the ATTO Tools revealed it to be able to read at 65MB/s when running 9.1 it was an ABSOLUTE dream to have it run OS X.. compared to the internal bus at a max. of some 9MB/s (yes, I know you would like it too!) The IBM DPSS's run at a cool 30MB/s or so... at minimum in excess of 150%-400% or more (in excess of 15MB/s-20MB/s or so..easily) compared to the internal SCSI-2 bus. With my new ATTO card (OWC special..), I (surely) hoped to get the AtlasV booting OS-X. No such luck... On the internal SCSI-2 bus it works nicely, but not while connected through the ATTO-card.. :-( I might add.... !@#$%%%!&!%%! grmmmblll... you imagine disk-performance exceeding the standard SCSI-2 bus by some 6 times... this is A NEW MACHINE - NEW EXPERIENCE FOR 7 Yrs. OLD HARDWARE!!! Under 10.1, it seemed to be impossible to get the OS installing on one of the IBM-DPSS drives. (BTW.. form the ATTO-test.. the Atlas-V is MUCHO faster than the IBM-DPSS) Only the Atlas-V was suitable. No change until now.. So, booted in OS-X, I prepared one of the IBM disks for OS-X.. just running the installer and browsing the Install-CD. Yep.. the OSxxxxxx install file in the system/installers/ folder (approx/whatever) is the one to pick.. So you can run an install on another disk quite nicely. (next up will be an experiment on a network install to an iMac shared volume...) Booting from the IBM-DPSS ater a successfull install turned out to be a pipe-dream.. :-( No-can-boot.. after a minute or so, it continued booting 9.1... (original startup disk) grmmmbll The big Q is: Is Xpostfacto IMCOMPATIBLE with the -Apple supported- ATTO-card or not? My experience tells me: - for booting from it.. YES - for using it for files.. NO God.... I would love to see the Atlas-V drive boot of the ATTO card in OS-X... and the IBM's.. and if I could spare the money, I would buy MORE ATLAS-V disks... sure as hell... maybe even run it in RAID. Imagine DISK-STORAGE to get really close to the MAXIMUM RAM-memory throughput spec's for the 7500 (/8500/9500 - or replace the 5 by a 6..) If it's End Of Live eventually.. it really would be EOL by then.. That it may be at least 2 yrs. in the future... Thanks Ryan, for expanding the life of my PM 7500... and the fun I have running it on OS-X.. way cooooool!!! (applause... following me & the audience standing up & so.. come on guys! Do I REALLY need to encourage you??? Hmm???) Any feedback/suggestions/comments/rants... go ahead. Please DO.!! Regards, Paul P.S. Yes, I know.. I invested (some) money in upgrading my machine... but the fun part is: it still is the same basic hardware (motherboard) I bought 7 years ago... Now, would you be so kind to show me ONE Windows-PC you could've done the same trick with??? Meaning: your 7-year old Pentium-100 or -120 machine with some upgrades runs Windows-XP today???? I wish you all the luck in the world finding 1 (ONE) machine..... (Thanks agian Ryan!!!!! LOL) |
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RE: 7500 + mucho upgrades & still (some) headaches |
October, 19, 2002 4:26 PM |
p.de.haan2 |
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Tried, tested, failed, tried, updated, tested, failed... pffff.... Just when I got really used.. maybe addicted to X... I went back into 9.. bad news from there on. Output to monitor didn't do anyting. Nor on the ATI Radeon, nor on the standard monitor. Blank screen (ore dimmed/low power mode), no output. Grrrmbl... Now if only I had a simple terminal to see any output messages on the modem or printer-port. Maybe I can trick my Palm IIIxe into doing just that. BUT does the serial output work?? Otherwise I don't have to go the extra miles by making cables etc. to try to test this! And if serial works.. what parameters are used? 9600/8/N/1? 19200/8/N/1? 9600/7/E/1?? Or?? (just to make it easier :-)) All my harddisks are (always) formatted with the standard Apple drivers. So Apple Drive Setup is the standard tool here. So the symptom may look the same, the actual situation isn't. ATTO upgrade... The ATTO ExpressPCI UL2D came with driver version 1.43f. On the website, version 1.6.4 was available as the latest & greatest. To bad that it didnt work for me at all.. somehow, somewhere there's a house of glass... I can't get back into OS X anymore. Reverting back to a card with a 1.4.3f driver (bought that one for a friend of mine) didn't solve it anymore.. OSX starts booting and freezes now. Maybe there's something damaged. Disk First Aid claims all's well.. no problems. Reinstalling BootX & Extensions with XpostFacto 2.2.3 gets me nowhere either. So the question I put forward to ATTO to get some of the older flash images won't resolve it either I guess. Some positive news... When it sort-of all worked 2 days back, I tried "PCI Extreme" - search for Quartz on Versiontracker.com - with nice results.. it brings back the 'snappy' response I was used to running 9.1. Well worth a try! Leaning on OS X mail entirely - with no back-up scenario is a bad idea as well. To my knowledge there's no compatible client out there for OS 9.. No OS X.. only webmail left :-( When using Netscape Communicator (6/7), it's relatively easy to set op the lot to use a shared area for the mailboxes. This means mail works in OS X and OS 9... Now that's cool! New symptom... when booting into OS 9 (fresh install/build), the system is in loop when loading the finder. Force-quit the finder and all goes well again. Weird, very weird... Now I did run memory tests for hours on end.. to see if that area might have a problem. Nothing found! So memory should be OK I guess. I used the RAMometer v1.3 from Newer. If there's a better suggestion to run under OS 9 (or 8.5), they're welcome. It seems I'm facing a back-up of the crucial files in my OS X disk.. and do a re-install from scratch.. :-( Regards, Paul |
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7500 + mucho upgrades & still (some) headaches... |
October, 17, 2002 7:50 PM |
OSXGuru |
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Were you able to boot from the ATTO card with Mac OS X 10.1? It's not quite clear to me whether the problem started in 10.2, or was always there. One way to get a look at what is going on early in the boot process is to set the output-device in the Open Firmware menu of XPostFacto to point to your monitor, and then hold down command-v as the computer restarts. You should see some kind of error message (before the computer gives up and reboots into 9). The symptom you describe is something that sometimes occurs when a disk has been formatted with a utility other than Apple's Drive Setup or Intech's Hard Disk SpeedTools. In that case, reformatting with one of those programs can help. It is also possible that the ATTO card just isn't bootable in Mac OS X. However, it had been my impression that most of ATTO's cards were bootable. |
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