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Quadra 650 nubus

Quadra 650 nubus Hardware 54 posts Jun 15, 2008 — Jun 22, 2008
Try low-level formatting it again; SCSI drives as a whole don't die if you botch a low-level format, you just have to low-level format them _again_. That's because the drive firmware is stored on a chip instead of on the disk.

You might need to use something like SilverLining or the MicroNet Utility.

Try low-level formatting it again; SCSI drives as a whole don't die if you botch a low-level format, you just have to low-level format them _again_. That's because the drive firmware is stored on a chip instead of on the disk.
Yeah, but it doesn't show up in Hd setup anymore, have to try another program i guess.

hd setup doesn't recognize it again
Not much opportunity to try another low-level format, really.

SCSI Probe is pretty good, it does nothing with a disk's data, it just talks to the SCSI controller on the disk, which in this case I think, has got very confused.

HD SC Setup (patched)
I took that to mean he was already using a patched version.

Yeah, but it doesn't show up in Hd setup anymore, have to try another program i guess.
Try Anubis 3.01, it is quite recent (works perfectly wih ATTO Silicon Express IV) and available here:

http://www.fenestrated.net/~macman/stuff/SiliconExpress/

And it is capable of creating partitions with 64k blocks, that means partitions as large as 4 GB under os 7.5.5 :-)

ooohh... so it boots even with the 1.65? good to know...
Yup, at least with Quadra, I don't have nubus powerpc to try it there ;-)

'Low-level' formatting, which defines the data tracks and their spacing, is done at the factory with precision gear. Probably no formatting utility that gets into the hands of users can do this, and certainly the gear isn't available to them.

Formatting a drive by a user is a matter of erasure of existing data (if erasure is invoked) and writing the logical structures (partitions) and drivers to the disk. In Apple's case this is at least five partitions, only one of which becomes the 'volume' mounted on the desktop.

If you cannot 'see' the data volume on the desktop you can choose between dead drive, scrambled or missing driver, defective cabling or power supply to the drive. You know which you can eliminate in this case because you are there. If it is the driver, because early Apple disk utilities are less capable of 'taking over' drives that have been formatted with a third-party utility, although they should be able to unmount and repair Apple-formatted drives, you need Silverlining (LaCie), FWB's Hard Disk ToolKit, Intech's HD SpeedTools, ATTO's utility or the like. All of these can follow Apple's partition scheme and provide the requisite drivers (plural).

de

HD SC Setup (patched)
I took that to mean he was already using a patched version.
Yes, I noted in my post that I saw that after the fact. :p

Try a little utility called Lido if you can find it. It's worked miracles for me on SCSI drives, where HD SC and SCSIprobe have failed me.

I guess its back to ebay if this thing is "a curious lump of metal and plastic"

The stupidest thing happened too - I opened a drawer to get a radio out, a loose cord caught on the power cord and pulled it out of the wall.
In such situations, I have had very good luck reformating the drive on a PC with an Adaptec SCSI card. If you have such available or have a friend with one, you may be able to recover the drive.

The older Adaptec cards such as the 2940UW have an option at start-up to press ctrl-A and enter the firmware routines. One of those routines will do a low level format of the hard drive and I've found that that will usually recover the drive for Macintosh use.

Since you can probably find a 2940UW for $10 or lieing around in a ditch waiting to be picked up, your biggest obstacle would be coming up with a PC to try it in.

Alright i downloaded Lido, put it on a CD. The program opened but as it got to ID 0 it threw errors at me and I was unable to do anything (one said unable to read drive capacity, other said something like bad scsi command). I'm trying Anubis Plus right now , seems to be working but I am worried about the errors in Lido.

Alright, thanks guys the disk intitialized with Anubis and it works now.

Excellent news!

w00t! I'm very glad to hear that it's working for you!

Awesome!

Techfury90, you say "The Jackhammers only are 20 MB/s"

I bought six of them new (different type), and have to proclaim that three of the pci ones with 6 seagate 12450Ws total were faster in benchmarks than the unix NULL device on a high end sun workstation, which did not have to actually even store bytes. ( dev/nul )

Keep in mind the seagate 12450W was a fragile special type of drive only made once in history and had TWO heads per surface of each platter. TWO ! They were very fragile. But in 1994 they were 12 megabytes per second each sustained if formatted with 2K blocks. With 512 byte blocks four drives got 34 MB/sec on quadra 840avs using a pair of two jackhammer cards.

But its amusing to point out that PowerPC macs were slow as hell for a very very long time for slot I/O vs Quadra 840av and its NuBus. (quadra had double clocked nubus, and the cpu was 80 mhz internally, not 40, if you are literal).

i think a 650 has a direct processor slot allowing access at 33 Mhz/32 bit, but few cards ever made for it I assume.

I think you are right though about one card being overkill for it though, if xfering data to the motherboard and not another nubus card.

In a early Quadra 20 Mhz (not 10) was possible, and for 32 bit xfers that would be bursts of 80 MB/sec between two non-apple nubus products.

in later quadraas (840av) the slots really ran allowing 40 MB sec with ease and practically begging for two jackhammer cards.

Interestingly, RAM could barely eat the data that fast so you had to do something such as move it 128 bits at a time per opcode , when not doing DMA from scsi, via MOVE16 instructions using the cache controller as a high speed datapump.

Anyway I am biased because I own few quadras, used to work at FWB for a few years, and also used to run the fastest RAID anyone could afford (or not afford) to construct for specialized animation pruposes (uncompressed full frame video playback).

But if a person asks what the fastest setup could be, chances are they want to know their options.

----

I am just bummed that motorola was so many years ahead of the world of technology. Motorola REFUSED to consider ever making 5 volt modern CPUS ever again and wanted everyone to recreate entire motherboards oriented around the astounding 3 volt 68060 chip

a chip that would have rewritten history and made the powerpc look like a sick joke

but the world had been 5 volt for the previous 40 years and refused to budge.

nothing became of the beloved 68060 , not even at NeXT

ov course soon after the world learned how to run the cpu at different voltages than mobo, and 3 volt became a norm, then 2v, 1.5 , 1.2 v

poor motorola, they were right, and 5 years ahead of the world

do not ever forget, it was 3.5 times faster than a 68040 chip in benchmarks

and if apple went for it moto would have made more newer ones.

RISC was a dead end. Even in 2008 the CPU champion is a CISC (the pentium offspring x86).

Now RISC is dead for apple. Shame on apple for not making even one apple with a 68060 to run rings around your initial powermacs.

TRISC was a dead end. Even in 2008 the CPU champion is a CISC (the pentium offspring x86).
I dunno about the internal workings of the AMD chips, but the modern Intel chips have a very RISC-like microcode that all the x86 instructions are broken down into. The silicon doesn't actually have paths for the x86 instructions, which makes the RISC vs CISC debate extremely poorly defined.

CISC died when the Pentium Pro came out, its been RISC ever since internally from Intel, the K5 series (Pentium equivalent) I think was RISC as well from AMD.

The best thing about PPC was the FPU completely obliterated anything 68K (even the 68060), so moving to PPC was smart. 68060 wasn't even compatible with the rest of the 68K line before it, so it wasn't going to be used by Apple anyway.

While I love Nubus, it sucks compared to PCI.

I was under the impression that the CPUs beyond the original Pentium (I believe starting with the PPro) were a hybrid of both CISC and RISC methods. I remember going through this article back in 1999 from Ars Technica:

http://arstechnica.com/cpu/4q99/risc-cisc/rvc-1.html

Incidentally, there's another followup almost 10 years later from that article, specifically in regards to mobile processors, and especially Atom:

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/risc-vs-cisc-mobile-era.ars

Well some translation is going on at the front end, but all the work should be RISC.

From my understanding RISC is just made up of small simple commands that you can speed up and pipeline, while CISC used larger more complex blocks that you had to deal with in specific order.

To keep compatability with the old desgins you needed a chip that handled the older code, so a translating unit seems to have been the smart thing to do.

Under a microscope a new CPU core probably looks alot different then a 386 one.

The way I heard it was that the idea behind RISC was that the instructions weren't as powerful as CISC instructions, but could be manipulated in more ways than CISC instructions. Example: It might take several RISC instructions to do the same thing as one CISC instruction, but those less powerful RISC instructions could be recombined in different ways to do things more efficiently than using more complex CISC instructions which may have been more wasteful of CPU and memory resources.

Not quite, simplisticly...

(a) large register file - reducing memory accesses

( B) same length instructions - simplify fetch queue

© each instruction takes one clock cycle - rather than variable number

CISC have variable length instructions and variable execution time per instruction.

mp.ls