ATTO UL3D / UL4D SCSI Pains

Hi,

I have a number if New World G3/4 PowerMacs and I am trying to get hold of a SCSI card to use some late 80-pin U320 drives with tgat works in OS 9 and OS X.

 I have had success with OS X 10.4 and 10.5 on these drives with a ATTO UL4D so I am pretty sure my cabling, termination and sacraficial rites are all correct. The drives are lashed up using 80-pun to 68-pin+Molex adapters. Again, they worked flawlessly in a G4 PowerMac QS booting and using Mac OS X.

I have a UL3D card but I can't get a lot of sense out of it. I initially tried it in a Rev. 2 Blue & White G3 with a (yes, I know) 1GHz G4 upgrade in it but couldn't get a lick of sense out of the drives. No boot and seemed to sit scanning busses for boot drives for a very long time with no success. The UL4D didn't seem to behave a lot better so I dismissed it as a test candidate.

I put the same 2 drives and the UL3D it in a G4 Gigabit Ethernet model and it was still unhappy, flashing "where am I supposed to boot from Folder/? and it seems to take an age to decide there's no drive. I eventually booted the system from the MacOS9Lives 9.2.2 Install image on a FireWire SSD and the card and drives were not recognised. As the UL3D card was from an unknown source, I decided to flash the firmware with the OS 9 flash utility. Although it already had 1.66 firmware I forced an overwrite usin the 1.66U updater.

This produced some level of success in that 9.2.2 now tried to mount the drives. Only one of themmounts, but the other drive with 10.5 Leopard on won't, but I suspect it has no OS 9 drivers because Leopard doesn't care about that nasty old Classic OS.

The drive with 10.4.11 and 9.2.2 on is recognised but still won't boot.

As I can boot from MacOS9Lives via FW, I decided to attach a different drive (same model, different cspacity) and start fresh. A restore of MacOS9Lives 9.2.2 went just dandy but that isn't bootable either. More concerning is the FW 9.2.2 boot freezes and the new drive just headbangs constantly. Could be a bad drive I guess but I ran out of energy.

 I guess the takeaway TLDR; question is are UL3Ds usually this painful to work with? Of so what alternative do I have to work with OS X and OS 9 at the same time?

 I also found a stray post somewhere tgat said Version 1.01 of the UL4D firmware worked with OS 9 (or both?) but I've never been able to find it.