[G4] Acard AEC-6280M Boot

[Ronald Steinke]

On 15 Oct, 2008, at 8:09 AM, shopdog at mac.com wrote:

> I recently installed an Acard AEC-6280M IDE card in my G4 (AGP  
> Graphics).
>
> I'm having frequent issues with not being able to boot from drives  
> connected to the card bus.

How many hard drives do you have installed in the chassis? I don't  
believe your AGP model has enough power output to run more than three  
drives properly at startup.

I ran into a similar circumstance when I mounted a 4th drive via a  
Sonnet IDE controller card.
When I unplugged one of the "extra" two drives, the machine would boot  
without any problem. As long as I had a fourth drive plugged in, the  
machine would stutter and fail to boot.

It didn't matter which drive I unplugged as I had systems installed on  
each and could select which drive to boot from by holding the "Option"  
key down at boot.

I did some mathematics and found that the startup power draw was just  
under the maximum output of the power supply. I believe that I was  
pushing the envelope power-wise with the fourth drive plugged in along  
with the CD drive, the Zip drive, and the other three drives.