Hello, I've been away for awhile. Anyway, I came across this thread and this guys slowly progressing problems sound exactly like what happened to my 9600 a little while ago.
My setup was:
9600/350
1 Ghz Sonnet G4
512MB ram
36GB wide scsi drive
Ati 9200 video card.
When I first installed the sonnet G4 card, everything worked wonderfully! Mac OS 8/9 booted and ran fine, and Mac OS 10.2 and then 10.3 worked wonderfully too. But after a year or so of use, the 9600 started flaking out. Sometimes I'd get random Type 11 errors, sometimes the machine wouldn't boot all the way, sometimes it ran fine. Then I started getting all kinds of corruption on my wide SCSI drive (wide scsi to 50 pin adapter). I'd repair it, but then there would be more corruption in a few days. Then my Mac OS X partition started refusing to boot at all. I changed the cache settings, re-installed, etc. Nothing worked. A few weeks later, Mac OS 8/9 stopped booting, including off of CD-ROMs, my 9600 was dead
It turned out that the on board SCSI controller had gone bad, I went into the open firmware and it couldn't see the bus any longer! I said to myself "what the hell?!?" At first I suspected the wide SCSI to 50 pin adapter, but then I found the real culprit, the Sonnet G4 card! I had always wondered why sonnet pulled the G4 card off the market so quickly, and I'm pretty sure I found out why... the hard way.
Anyways, 2 new motherboards later (yes I killed a second 9600 board with the G4 card also), I'm back in business with a 450mhz G3 card. It's not a G4, but it works and no more abnormal behavior, or ruined SCSI buses. It's been working now for months with no issues... so far. I miss the G4's speed, but there's something VERY wrong with the sonnet G4 card, or with using G4's in the 8600/9600 workstations. That's my 2 cents.
My setup was:
9600/350
1 Ghz Sonnet G4
512MB ram
36GB wide scsi drive
Ati 9200 video card.
When I first installed the sonnet G4 card, everything worked wonderfully! Mac OS 8/9 booted and ran fine, and Mac OS 10.2 and then 10.3 worked wonderfully too. But after a year or so of use, the 9600 started flaking out. Sometimes I'd get random Type 11 errors, sometimes the machine wouldn't boot all the way, sometimes it ran fine. Then I started getting all kinds of corruption on my wide SCSI drive (wide scsi to 50 pin adapter). I'd repair it, but then there would be more corruption in a few days. Then my Mac OS X partition started refusing to boot at all. I changed the cache settings, re-installed, etc. Nothing worked. A few weeks later, Mac OS 8/9 stopped booting, including off of CD-ROMs, my 9600 was dead
It turned out that the on board SCSI controller had gone bad, I went into the open firmware and it couldn't see the bus any longer! I said to myself "what the hell?!?" At first I suspected the wide SCSI to 50 pin adapter, but then I found the real culprit, the Sonnet G4 card! I had always wondered why sonnet pulled the G4 card off the market so quickly, and I'm pretty sure I found out why... the hard way.
Anyways, 2 new motherboards later (yes I killed a second 9600 board with the G4 card also), I'm back in business with a 450mhz G3 card. It's not a G4, but it works and no more abnormal behavior, or ruined SCSI buses. It's been working now for months with no issues... so far. I miss the G4's speed, but there's something VERY wrong with the sonnet G4 card, or with using G4's in the 8600/9600 workstations. That's my 2 cents.