Hello everyone,
I have a Pioneer 12x SCSI CD drive recognized as Pioneer DR-466 or DR-U12X mounted in a scsi box to be used as an external player. This CD player works very well with FWB drivers on a computer where the operating system is already installed. As this is the fastest player I own I would like to use it occasionally when I need to do an OS reinstall on my Apple MACs. Unfortunately this player does not come with apple firmware therefore it is not possible to boot an installation disc from it. Is there a way to solve this problem?
Thank you
G
Sounds like a difficult thing to fix. You need a driver to use that drive on a Mac at all, but in the case of booting from it, the code in question is in the Mac's ROM., so you'd have to modify that. Unless your an expert in the assembler for the Mac in question (68k or PPC, as far as I know most of the Intel and Apple-ARM machines don't usually have SCSI) and had a way to do that... Seems unlikely, especially since it would need to be done for each machine you wanted to boot an install CD on.
About the only way I can think of around that would be to have a bootable SCSI hard drive or maybe a Flash based SCSI emulator that would boot up enough to load the driver and then jump start the CD boot process... Still seems like a pretty tough nut to crack, especially to make it generic enough to work on a variety of Mac models.
Seems like having a cheap Apple branded drive around in case you need to do an install, and use the Pioneer once the OS is loaded would be much easier.
I have tried to solve this booting a CD from a non apple CD player for many years. The only solution I found is to find a cheap apple internal or external drive. I just bought one myself so I could boot OS 8 and other CD's
But I really believed that the firmware of the cdrom drive had to be modified to be recognized by (vintage) Apple computers ...
I do not miss the apple cdrom units, the problem is that among those I have the best performing is at 8x. I would like to use a unit that reaches at least 12x or higher. Unfortunately 12x apple cdrom drives are not easy to find and don't come cheap.