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| Click here to select a new forum. | | Interesting tidbit about Apple firmware hard drives | Posted by: johnklos on 2015-11-05 11:48:47
I thought this was an interesting discovery, so I figured some of you folks might like to know.
For ages I've used SCSI-IDE and SCSI-IDE-SATA adapters on various m68k Macs. I just had a 2 TB drive fail in a Quadra 610 so I decided to replace it. One of the spare drives I have lying around is a 640 gig Apple SATA hard drive from a Mac Pro. Normally, I'd have to use the patched Drive Setup program to first initialize, then the Apple HD SC Setup program from A/UX to create A/UX partitions for NetBSD, then the non-patched Drive Setup to update the driver to make it bootable.
This time, because it has the little Apple logo on the drive, I decided to try the unpatched Drive Setup program. It worked! Even old m68k Macs will see an Apple firmware SATA drive on a SCSI bus. Neat!
| Posted by: CC_333 on 2015-11-05 20:31:43
That's quite interesting!
I guess whatever that little tag or identifier is, it has remained unchanged from the original 20SCs, and thus is still recognizible by the old utilities.
c
| Posted by: Paralel on 2015-11-06 12:15:07
If I remember correctly, its just a little bit of text that says APPLE or APPL as an identifier in the very first part of the drive ROM.
| Posted by: IPalindromeI on 2015-11-06 18:29:25
AFAIK, it was a SCSI command that returned a "COPYRIGHT APPLE" string, not present on other firmwares.
| Posted by: CC_333 on 2015-11-06 19:01:42
Well, apparently that command is still present in SATA firmwares, and the adapter somehow knows to translates it into it's SCSI equivalent.
c
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