Embracing Obsolescence

- 2006.11.17

Verizon's lines were down again for just aboutthis entire past week, so I apologize for Part 3 of our SATA sagabeing a little late. I am grateful for Verizon finally fixing thephone lines so my Internet service can continue unabated. Now wecan close the SATA report with a healthy dose of good news.

Mac os; linux; ıos; androıd; retro POPULAR GAMES. NBA 2K Playgrounds 2. Draft Day Sports: Pro Basketball 2021. Pro Basketball Manager 2021. But some Mac users still need to burn their own Blu-rays or read data off BD discs, so there are plenty of third-party Blu-ray drives available for the Mac.And once those drives became available, a few enterprising companies who did (presumably) pay up for the keys to decrypt Blu-ray discs released Mac apps to play regular Blu-ray movies with those drives.

I had already tried every conceivable trick to get the Power Mac 7600 to boot into OS X fromany drive connected to the OWC 2+2 SATA PCI card. Swapping cables, swapping powerconnectors, connecting just the PATA (parallel ATA) drive and SATAadapter, connecting just the SATA drive, adding the OS X10.3.9 SCSI hard drive in tandem with either, and then both thedrives connected to the SATA card, but I didn't have any realsuccess.

A Clean Start

Instead of continuing to beat my head against the wall, Idecided to make a fresh start. With the 30 GB PATA drive connectedto the OWC SATA card and the OS X 10.3.9 SCSI drive connectedto the internal bus, I booted the 7600 into Mac OS 9.1 from thePATA drive.

Then I copied some important data onto the SCSI drive, popped ina Mac OS 9 CD, and rebooted from the CD. I erased theOS 9 partition on the 30 GB PATA drive and reinstalledOS 9 onto this 'minty fresh' HFS+ volume.

The installation went flawlessly, and I shut down the computerafter checking to make sure everything I needed was transferredback from the data residing temporarily on the SCSI drive. Iremoved the SCSI drive and swapped the 320 GB SATA hard drive backinto its slot in the 7600's chassis.

Booting the computer was a success, so with fingers crossed Iselected the OS X installer image from the PATA drive's secondpartition.

The 7600 rebooted, showed a bunch of white text on blackbackground (including something about loading an SATA driver!), andthen proceeded to grant my wish by showing me the OS Xinstaller! Disk Utility recognized both the PATA 30 GB Maxtor andthe 320 GB SATA Seagate, which allowed me to reformat the drives intheir entirety, not just erase volumes already formatted inMac-friendly HFS or HFS+ partitions.

Clearly, I could not do much with the Maxtor, as it containedboth the current startup disk and XPostFacto from the OS 9volume. However, the Seagate was fair game, and I formatted the 320GB drive into four partitions. I installed OS X onto the first45 GB partition.

The install ran flawlessly, if not a little slowly. Giddy withmy success thus far, the installer automatically rebooted the 7600after installation was completed.

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And then my frown was right side up again (uh, meaning I wasn'tsmiling anymore) after watching my fresh installation kernel panicbefore getting anywhere interesting. I figured XPostFacto mightneed to control the startup activity, and maybe the installer'stomfoolery with those settings was not appropriate.

I Missed Something

But wait, I was starting to think I missed something obvious.Big slap to the forehead! I was not able to install the necessaryXPostFacto components to the SATA drive before rebooting into theinstaller because it didn't contain any recognized volumes.

Luckily XPostFacto allows for this possibility and has a handyInstall Menu selection.

XPostFacto Install Menu

Consequently, I rebooted into Mac OS 9 by holding down theoption key, changed XPostFacto's preferences to use the newOS X installation on the 320 GB Seagate SATA hard drive'sOS X partition, installed the necessary XPostFacto components,and rebooted.

Grey screen, lots of icon spinning, but the startup drive wasnever located. Booting back into Mac OS 9 we go!

My next guess is that maybe the OS X installation didn't goso well after all. With XPostFacto, I changed the startup disk backto the OS X installer image on the PATA hard drive's secondvolume.

It Worked! Just Once...

Boy was I surprised, because the installer didn't pop up afterreboot - instead the 'Welcome to OS X 10.3 Panther' movie andmusic appeared. Once again giddy with excitement, I dove intoconfiguring the various user account and tweaking settings.

Satisfied with my success, I restarted the 7600.

On restart I received the grey screen and lots of icon spinning,but the startup drive never appearing. None of XPostFacto'ssettings yielded any success in booting from the OS X volumeon the SATA Seagate.

Booting back into the OS X installer image on the PATA wassuccessful, and subsequent attempts to get a working OS Xvolume on the SATA Seagate never went any further from initialsuccess followed by a 'missing in action' OS X startup volumeafter rebooting.

Not one big 320 GB volume, not having the first volume under8 GB in size, and nothing else in between could coerce the7600 to repeated success when booting into OS X from the SATASeagate.

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You Can Boot OS 9 from It

Even more curious to my feverishly racing mind, I made ainteresting discovery in my various experiments. Once the OS Xinstaller has formatted the 320 GB SATA, Mac OS 9 can beinstalled and booted from any HFS or HFS extended volume upon thatdrive.

Very weird, but I negotiated a compromise out of this curiousmess. I made the first partition on the 30 GB PATA hard drive myOS X boot volume, and the second remaining as the 10.3installer image.

The 320 GB SATA became four partitions representing data, datacopy, Mac OS 9 boot, and miscellaneous. The first twopartitions are 139.9 GB in size, the Mac OS 9 partition 4.9 GB, andthe miscellaneous partition is a healthy 13 GB. For whateverreason, the OWC 2+2 SATA PCI card can boot into Mac OS 9 or Xfrom the PATA drive, but only Mac OS 9 from the 320 GB SATASeagate (perpendicular storage) hard drive.

Unfortunately, I don't have any other SATA drives on hand totest whether this problem is related to the Seagate SATA harddrive, endemic to all SATA drives on Old World Mac systems, or someother quirk with my setup. However, if one were to understand thelimitations, even Old World Macs can benefit from the low cost andflexibility of the OWC 2+2 (Internal/External) SATA PCI card incomparison to competing SATA cards. Also, Low End Mac readers willbenefit from not having to go through all these hoops, as I havealready done so for any interested party.

Quick Summary

• Hard drives (whether adapted PATA or native SATA) attached tothe OWC 2+2 SATA PCI card are recognized by the classic Mac OS onlyif previously formatted with HFS or HFS+ volumes or if booted intoa Mac OS X installer via XPostFacto.
• Formatting attached SATA drives is not possible via theclassic Mac OS Drive Setup application, but individual HFS or HFS+partitions can be erased by the Finder's Erase Disk command.
• Once booted into OS X, either from an installer or an actualinstallation, Drive Setup can format the entire connected SATA harddrive, not just erase partitions. Although, Drive Setup can do thelatter as well.
• Adapted PATA drives are capable of booting into Mac OS 9or Mac OS X, but I have only successfully gotten SATA drivesto boot into Mac OS 9.

Feel free to email me any questions, comments, or relatedinformation about SATA drives in general. SATA technology is stillnew to me, as my current crop of computers only natively supportsSCSI and/or PATA. I'm learning on the fly here, and it's quitepossible that I have overlooked some easy answer to the admittedlymuch smaller list of caveats with this SATA setup on legacyMacs.

I'm this close to giving an unequivocally favorablerecommendation to this card for any Mac with PCI slots, but only ifthe users understand the remaining possible issues with suchunsupported configurations. If I uncover more information, I'llmake sure to report back in an SATA epilogue.

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Further Reading

• Old Power Macs and SATA Not a Marriage Madein Heaven, 2006.11.03
• Musings on Low-end SATA Cards in PCI PowerMacs, 2006.11.06

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