Interesting tidbit about Apple firmware hard drives

#1 Thu, 5 Nov 2015 - 19:48 68kMLA

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!

#2 Fri, 6 Nov 2015 - 04:31 68kMLA

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

#3 Fri, 6 Nov 2015 - 20:15 68kMLA

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.

#4 Sat, 7 Nov 2015 - 02:29 68kMLA

AFAIK, it was a SCSI command that returned a "COPYRIGHT APPLE" string, not present on other firmwares.

#5 Sat, 7 Nov 2015 - 03:01 68kMLA

Well, apparently that command is still present in SATA firmwares, and the adapter somehow knows to translates it into it's SCSI equivalent.

c