B&W G3. No boot from old OS disk or YDL on hard drive, boots from YDL CD

[Rick Thomas]

On Oct 21, 2004, at 2:09 PM, Eric Dunbar wrote:

> On Thu, 21 Oct 2004 09:51:14 -0500, matthew dechant
> <mdechant at insightpd.com> wrote:

>> Secondly, I was using an Adaptec aha2940 SCSI controller (not mac 
>> specific,
>> called power domain or something), which YDL recognized perfectly, 
>> but Open
>> Firmware did not. There are apparantly very few cards supported by 
>> OF, which
>> of course in both cases above, you FIRST need OF to support it and 
>> recognize
>> it as a bootable disk, even if YDL doesn't have a problem with it.
>
> Very strange! The Adaptec 2940 SCSI is Apple standard issue. I had one
> in a B&W once upon a blue moon and the SCSI HD that was hooked up to
> it booted quite nicely on YDL 2.1. (I seem to recall that drives
> hooked up to the SCSI bus aren't of the hda1 naming variety though).

The Adaptec boards come in several flavors of firmware:

1) There's a proprietary Apple firmware that you get if you buy the 
card from Apple installed in a system also from Apple.  It supports 
booting MacOS and also supports Apple's version of Open Firmware.

2) There's a version of the above from Adaptec (without the Apple stamp 
of approval) that Apple will not support, but that contains some bug 
fixes the Apple-branded version doesn't.  This is what you can buy on 
the third-party market.

3) Then there's the PC version that does not support booting MacOS or 
Open Firmware, but does support PC BIOS functionality if you plug it 
into a PC.

Once booted, Linux support all three versions, because the Linux driver 
does not depend on any but the most basic features of the on-card 
firmware.  Booting Linux is a different problem -- I believe you need 
OF support to do that.

It *may* be possible to download a program from Adaptec that will flash 
the firmware on the PC card to make it look like a (non-Apple-branded) 
Open Firmware compatible card.  I've heard rumors to that effect, but 
little in the way of details.  FWIW, the rumors also tell of attempts 
to re-flash the firmware causing total loss of functionality if not 
done just right.

Enjoy!

Rick