On Jan 25, 2005, at 1:41 PM, J�rg Duurkoop wrote:
I've been trying different firewire enclosures to boot my beige from but no luck so far. I have the Sonnet Trio PCI combo-card in a 300 Mhz MT with a rev. 2 mobo.
I've read on this list before that beige G3s do boot from firewire-disks and that the Sonnet cards give no problems. Is it the chip on the controller in the enclosure?
Bruce Johnson replied:
You're mistaken.
No Old World system boots from firewire; <clip>
Actually, Bruce is mistaken (a real rarity). I'm typing this on a Beige rev.3 booted from a Maxtor 120 GB external Firewire drive. You can't boot from Firewire directly, you must use XPostFacto 3.0 and select the "helper drive" boot process in the "XPF Options" window. This requires a "helper drive" that is normally bootable which would be drives attached to the internal ATA bus, the internal or external SCSI bus, or any bootable PCI card bus. This drive does not need to be large or even have a real bootable System on it, I believe the XPF helper function only copies the BootX, Extensions.kextcache, and Extensions.mkext files plus some other small files, usually less than 5 MB total, so virtually any drive or partition is large enough to be the "helper". The boot process begins on the "helper" and then is restarted on the Firewire drive after the Firewire has been initiated in the early boot process of the helper. This "hand-off" is normally seamless, but every once-in-a-while the Firewire drive isn't recognized and if you select the "verbose startup" flag in the "XPF Options" you'll see a message "Still waiting for root device" which will repeat each minute. You can normally simply either replug the Firewire cable, or cycle the FW power, or both and get the boot to "startup" normally. As I said, this is rare, and probably means the drive needs repair for something simple like an incorrect boot header. No biggie.
Once you begin using XPostFacto to boot via Firewire you need to remember never to use the real Apple Startup Disk control panel (OS 9) or pane (OS X) since these will confuse the situation because they don't recognize the complex boot sequence that XPF has put into the NVRAM & PRAM. If you need to boot back into OS 9, either use XPF to select the OS 9 drive, or use the "option" key on Restart to boot OS 9 (this will leave the normal Startup as the OS X volume). To leave OS 9 and boot to OS X you should always use XPF, and sometimes things can get "confused" if you've installed new software to the OS X volume and XPF doesn't catch it and fails to "synchronize" the helper to the new extensions. Luckily there are manual controls that can force a resynchronization so that every extension that is supposed to load does. I normally leave the "verbose startup" flag set to "on" just to be able to read the dialog in case anything goes wrong. If you've never read a verbose startup dialog (it's in the System.log of Console) you might get fooled into thinking many things were amiss that actually are normal. It takes a while to be able to see what's what.
It's so neat that these old world 7300-9650's, and BeigeG3's plus clones can boot from Firewire when many new world iMacs, B&W G3's and early G4's can't. Firewire is a wonderfully inexpensive and flexible solution to the slow internal SCSI & ATA buses on these older machines.
As for your questions about cards & enclosures:
Nearly all cards work, with those with Texas Instruments chipsets being better than average, and NEC & VIA being slightly worse. Some older cards couldn't do the full 400 MB/sec speed (A400) and were only 100 or 200 MB/sec (A100/200) so be sure to get a recent card. Some of the USB 2.0/FW cards will function for both in OS X.
As for enclosure FW-ATA bridge chipsets, you need to avoid Genesys Logic (GL-700, GL-711, GL-811) at all costs - it will not work with Mac. Oxford 911 is generally considered best, with others like Indigita, Initio, etc. all being OK for the most part. Jaguar booting is fine and generally flawless. Panther booting is plagued by something known as the Panther Firewire Bug that is vicious and has not been fixed, but on the contrary has gotten worse in the latest 10.3.6 & 10.3.7 updates. Like AIDS, it can be "controlled" and booting can be done safely. The key is to disable all Sleep functions in the Energy Saver control panel and then close all applications and allow the System to "settle" before any Shutdown or Restart. The disk corruption that the Panther Firewire Bug does only occurs during Sleep, Shutdown or Restart, but if you forget and don't do these you may loose your entire System in such a way that no repair short or reformatting the entire drive will get you going again.
The helper drive boot process has another really neat aspect that new world computers can't match yet. It can enable booting from many PC version PCI cards (both ATA & SCSI) that would normally not be bootable on a Mac. These PC cards generally lack the specific Mac boot ROM but can be used in newer Macs for "storage only" with no boot possibility. By using the "helper drive" while coming from OS X to OS X using XPF you can get these cards to boot exactly like the Firewire cards boot. PC versions of fast SCSI cards like the Adaptec 29160 are much cheaper than Mac cards, so being able to boot from these fast PC cards is really a neat process that new world Macs still can't do.
Good luck! Kris Tilford
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