Blue and white G3s and SCSI cards and devices

Several issues have come up regarding SCSI cards and connecting external SCSI devices to the new blue and white G3s. I don't think all the puzzle pieces are yet in place, so I imagine further updates to this item are likely.

Zip drives

Ronald Guest writes: "Adaptec just informed me that there is a problem using external SCSI Zip drives on the new B&W G3s. They attribute it to a problem in the Zip driver and claim that Iomega needs to update their driver. I have an Adaptec 2940UW installed and it works OK with other external devices. However, the machine consistently hangs when trying to write to an external SCSI Zip." Iomega has not confirmed this explanation. [Note: We have previously reported (a and b) related issues.]

CD-R drives

A reader could not get a Yamaha 4x4x16 CD-R/CD-RW to work with the SCSI card that came with their B&W G3 400 or with the Adaptec 2940UW card.

Johan Leckner reports: "Using a B&W G3 400, I'm experiencing problems with my Adaptec CD-R software. As long as Toast (3.5.5) or DirectCD (1.0.3) extensions are installed, my machine will crash (without having to open the CD Direct control panel or starting Toast). Without any Adaptec control panels or extensions enabled, the machine runs like a dream. If I remove the CD-R unit from the SCSI chain, the crashes do not occur." He has an Ultra2 Wide SCSI card (AHA-2940U2B).

Michael O'Neill also had this problem, using the same 2940U2B card. He found a work-around: Load only the Toast and Apple CD/DVD extensions and have a CD in the drive at startup. He did not have this problem if he instead used a ATTO ExpressPCI SCSI card.

Mark Yoshinaka adds: "I am using a B&W G3 350 with an Adaptec PowerDomain 2940UW SCSI card. Initially, I did have problems getting my SCSI card to recognize my CD-R but after I updated the firmware to version 3.0 and installed PowerDomain Control 3.0, I haven't had any problems since. I also don't have any problems using Adaptec Toast version 3.5.5."

[Note: We have previously reported an issue with DirectCD 1.0.3 and the Yamaha drive.]

Booting from FWB formatted drives and arrays

Scott Boettcher received the following note from FWB Software Technical Support: "Our testing shows that you should have no problems booting your new computer from a driver with the HDT driver on it. You will not be able to boot from an array, however. We are continuing to investigate this now."

Fabio Pesavento similarly wrote that he could not boot his G3/BW if he had an array connected via an Adaptec 2940UW card. One possible work-around: "Make your first partition a single partition not in the array and the remaining partitions in the array."

Related to the above, note the following section from the Power Macintosh G3 (Blue and White) Read Me file:

Using a startup disk formatted with third-party formatting software You can use third party software such as Anubis or FWB to format and partition a hard disk in your Power Macintosh G3. However, if you install a System Folder on one of these partitions and select it as your startup disk in the Startup Disk control panel, the computer will not use the Startup Disk volume selected.

Update: Danny Lee of FWB informs me that this statement from Apple is incorrect. This problem did exist in an earlier version of Hard Disk ToolKit (prior to 2.5) but has since been corrected. However, it is correct that "we cannot boot from an array attached to a B/W G3, only simple volumes (including multi-partitioned devices)."