Compatible PCI IDE cards for Blue White G3

[Henry A. Leinhos]

Hi Marc, 

I have a B+W 300Mhz Rev A G3.  I got a Western Digital 120GB HD and found 
out that it wouldn't work with the IDE chip on the motherboard, so I pulled 
a Promise Ultra66 IDE card from an old PC and (also) found it wouldn't be 
recognized by MacOS (9.2, at least).  You have to have a mac-specific card 
that has a ppc-compatible bios loaded, which are considerablly more 
expensive(!). 

That said, this was my work-around. 

(I already had YDL3.0 installed on another HD in the machine, but this 
should work with the YDL3.0 install CD -- ether to install or in rescue 
mode) 

It turns out that the Linux drivers for the Promise cards can sidestep the 
bios (as far as i can tell), and the stock YDL 3.0 kernels (2.4.20-8e, I 
think) have the proper chipset support compiled in, so I could install YDL 
3.0 directly on the drive connected to the Promise card with the YDL install 
CD.  The problem is getting it to boot into linux after the install is 
finished.  At first I just used the rescue cd and gave it the following 
parameters at the boot prompt: 

boot: linux root=/dev/hdeX video=aty128fb 

where X is the particular partition number where your root directory was 
intstalled. 

After getting tired of booting using the floppy, I made a boot zip disk and 
set the OF boot device to zip:/yaboot. 

After that, I accessed the HD in MacOS via MOL. 

Hope this helps (a little) 

P.S the PCI card you used was probably a 32-bit PCI card, where the Macs all have 64-bit PCI slots (typical of Macs, atypical of PCs). The (shorter) 32-bit cards will fit in the (longer) 64-bit slots, which are backward-compatible to the 32-bit PCI interface.  


Marc wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have a rev A BW 400Mhz.  This means I cannot install
> linux/os X without problems.  It seems best to use a PCI-IDE
> card in a PCI slot.  Yesterday I got such a card from the PC
> world, but it didn't work ... (it had the ITE chip on it, and
> some dip switches the vendor didn't remember what they
> mean...)  The bus slot of this pc card was smaller than
> the 3 slots in the BW (it was maybe a 66Mhz card?  I replaced
> the mopnitor card with it, no go...
>
>
> Is there a list with compatible IDE cards?
> (with os x as well as linux...)
>
> I could use a scsi card too, compatability list?
>
> Marc
>
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