The chip dump has to be good. I've read the original (working) chip using my chip programmer and in-system from the DOS flasher utility and the dumps match. No matter how much I screw around with the card in the DOS utility, if I put that original chip back in, it works fine in OS X.

I'm really almost starting to wonder if there's something that's checking the chip ID. I'm pretty sure the SST chip I'm using is used on cards that have this SATA chip, because it's explicitly listed as one of the supported chips in the DOS flasher utility. But I wonder if it could be a copy protection thing where FirmTek only supports the chips that it has used in manufacturing or something. I dunno...maybe I'm talking crazy.

You're right, I need another known working chip to confirm for sure.

(I'm not sure if you're following, but I don't have CC's card yet...I bought another one on eBay that is known to work)

Edit: Actually, you know what? The WiebeTech firmware appears to work with the new SST chip after I flushed the kext cache (SeriTek likes to leave stuff behind and that has to be flushed from time to time). At this point I'm really starting to think that the SeriTek firmware is panicing because it doesn't like the chip ID...