How to enable SATA and UDMA modes for most ULi chipsets, Request it to be a sticky. Useful for many ULi chipsets. Options

[Black Knight]

I have been contacted upon many instances on how to get SATA and UDMA working on several different motherboards with a few different ULi Southbridges and since I now feel pretty confident that this method will work on each quite well, I wanted to summarize the several topics into one.

First, getting UDMA modes for the ALi/ULi 0x522910B9 chip is as simple as adding 0x522910B9 to the SATA section of /system/library/extensions/AppleVIAATA.kext/Contents/Info.plist. That's right, I said the SATA section and not the PATA section. I don't know why this works, but it does. You must then remove or rename /system/library/extensions/IOATAFamily.kext/Contents/Plugins/AppleGenericPCATA.kext so that it will not conflict with the VIA kext. If you are only going for UDMA modes, then run in Terminal:

chown -R root:wheel /system/library/extensions/
chmod -R 755 /system/library/extensions/

and finally repair permissions in Disk Utility. If you want SerialATA as well, wait and do these steps after the second step.

Second, getting SATA to work on ALi/ULi 0x528810B9 (ULi 1575 southbridge) 0x528910B9 (ULi 1567 southbridge) and possibly 0x528710B9 (I submitted the idea to the person having trouble with this one and haven't heard back yet). To get these to work, you once again need to edit AppleVIAATA.kext/Contents/Info.plist and add these three (or just the one you have if you know which one already) device ID(s) to the SATA section. The last thing you must do is go into your BIOS and set your SATA controller from AHCI mode to Emulated PATA mode. This shouldn't apply to the 0x528910B9 device ID as it is only SATA I mode and doesn't support AHCI anyways.

Good luck,

Paul

[Roninregain]

Just like to say it worked for me,

in xbench I used to get
uncache write 2.53 1.56 mb/sec [4k blocks]

its now 117.08 71.88 mb/sec


for some reason
Random - Uncached write 4k blocks is low compared to the other scores
its 15.65 , while others score between 95 and 137

[Black Knight]

I'm glad it worked for you. I hope I can get this topic stickied so more people can use it. I don't want it to end up on the 5th page or something when I know there are people out there that need this info.

[philter]

I tried for hours the other night before giving up to get 10.4.6 (tried 10.4.3 and .4 too) installed, really don't want to put myself through it all again. Can I ask your opinion if you think what you posted will work for me?

I can't boot into the installer with 10.4.4 or .6, it stops at BSD root disk1s3. If i use 10.4.3, it does load the installer and installs, but doesn't boot.

 Untitle.jpg ( 35.4K ) Number of downloads: 273

[Black Knight]

I tried for hours the other night before giving up to get 10.4.6 (tried 10.4.3 and .4 too) installed, really don't want to put myself through it all again. Can I ask your opinion if you think what you posted will work for me?

I can't boot into the installer with 10.4.4 or .6, it stops at BSD root disk1s3. If i use 10.4.3, it does load the installer and installs, but doesn't boot.

 Untitle.jpg ( 35.4K ) Number of downloads: 273

It will work, but you have to install through VMWare first. Then you can modify the files and finally boot natively. Good luck.

Paul

[philter]

thx for fast reply. I installed with vmware last night, will load it up and see what I come up with

[philter]

I had .6 installed via vmware, hooked up the drive to 1st channel, as a master (have sata with windows on it)..my optical drives are on 2nd channel.

This setup would not boot, it got to the point I mentioned above, so I installed macdrive and added 0x522910B9 & 0x528910B9 to the SATA section as instructed above.

Now when it boots off the hard drive, it goes further..it recognizes both my ide drive and my sata drive, and correctly finds BSD root as disk0s1. It then says

checking disk
mounting file systems
HFS: Created HFBT on OSX10.4.6volume
...

Cursor freezes at this point, been sitting there for about 5 minutes. Any ideas?

[Black Knight]

I had .6 installed via vmware, hooked up the drive to 1st channel, as a master (have sata with windows on it)..my optical drives are on 2nd channel.

This setup would not boot, it got to the point I mentioned above, so I installed macdrive and added 0x522910B9 & 0x528910B9 to the SATA section as instructed above.

Now when it boots off the hard drive, it goes further..it recognizes both my ide drive and my sata drive, and correctly finds BSD root as disk0s1. It then says

checking disk
mounting file systems
HFS: Created HFBT on OSX10.4.6volume
...

Cursor freezes at this point, been sitting there for about 5 minutes. Any ideas?

To be honest, I never had a good experience with 10.4.6. I would try to use Myzar's 10.4.5 and try again.

[philter]

I decided to wait it out, and now there is progress on the screen. Going very slowly, I can only assume dma is not working. Now it is saying

Checking catalog file (10minutes)
Checking multi linked files
Checking Catalog hierarchy (still going, probably another 10)


Very slow...should it matter that I did not boot into the dvd and do the chown process and repair disk? I couldn't do it via macdrive of course and it never has been booted into osx.

If this doesn't finish up after 30 minutes, I'll see about 10.4.5. Have you upgraded your .5 to later versions, or are you still using .5?

[Black Knight]

I decided to wait it out, and now there is progress on the screen. Going very slowly, I can only assume dma is not working. Now it is saying

Checking catalog file (10minutes)
Checking multi linked files
Checking Catalog hierarchy (still going, probably another 10)
Very slow...should it matter that I did not boot into the dvd and do the chown process and repair disk? I couldn't do it via macdrive of course and it never has been booted into osx.

If this doesn't finish up after 30 minutes, I'll see about 10.4.5. Have you upgraded your .5 to later versions, or are you still using .5?

Did you make sure and delete or rename /system/library/extensions/IOATAFamily.kext/Contents/AppleGenericPCATA.kext ?
Make sure that it is not there or is named AppleGenericPCATA.kext_disabled

See if that works.

[philter]

I renamed it to AppleGenericPCATA.kext.old.

On the Got Boot Device = line it shows the AppleVIAATADRIVER in the list, also IOATABLOCKSTORAGE..no mention of the GenericPCATA.


If i may ask, why do I not put the ULi chipset id into the PATA section of Info.plist?

[philter]

I got it to work, but I didn't test in between tweaks so I can't say for sure what did it. I went into disk utility via dvd and repaired permissions. THen I chose startup disk to be sure. Then I ran terminal and put the ATA device ID into the PATA and SATA section. When I rebooted, it worked..ran fast. Thanks for the thread and help.

[Black Knight]

I got it to work, but I didn't test in between tweaks so I can't say for sure what did it. I went into disk utility via dvd and repaired permissions. THen I chose startup disk to be sure. Then I ran terminal and put the ATA device ID into the PATA and SATA section. When I rebooted, it worked..ran fast. Thanks for the thread and help.

I'm happy to hear that it worked. Now you can get working on making other devices work. Have fun.

Paul

[weirdstapler]

This same method worked with the SiS 964 (SiS 661FX northbridge), with 0x55131039. Just in case anyone needed to know.

[Black Knight]

I just had someone else need this so I'm bumping it up to the top. I'd also like to request that it be a sticky. Thanks.

[donh]

Work nicely. Gives support for large hard drives also.

For what it is worth I think maybe should be added to the Tutorials (The Genius Bar) forum.

Also works to enable SATA2 as per your other post on my asrock dual sata 939.
http://forum.osx86project.org/index.php?sh...=2188&st=60

Here is the modified line in my appleviaata.kext
<string>0522910b9 0x528810b9 0x528910b9 0x528710b9 0x2360197b</string>
Dumb question. I used lowercase for the letters, you use upper, does it matter?

Next thing we nerd to figure out is how to out is how to include this into an install disk. Then we could install to SATA or large HD directly. This would help with a lot of boot errors and install issues.


Thanks for your great work and for documenting it.

Don

[Black Knight]

Work nicely. Gives support for large hard drives also.

For what it is worth I think maybe should be added to the Tutorials (The Genius Bar) forum.

Also works to enable SATA2 as per your other post on my asrock dual sata 939.
http://forum.osx86project.org/index.php?sh...=2188&st=60

Here is the modified line in my appleviaata.kext
<string>0522910b9 0x528810b9 0x528910b9 0x528710b9 0x2360197b</string>
Dumb question. I used lowercase for the letters, you use upper, does it matter?

Next thing we nerd to figure out is how to out is how to include this into an install disk. Then we could install to SATA or large HD directly. This would help with a lot of boot errors and install issues.
Thanks for your great work and for documenting it.

Don

I figured out how to add these modified kext files to Jas 10.4.7 install disk, but I haven't tested with it much so that is why you haven't seen them yet. Also, I made a package to install the driver during install so that it works off the bat. I'll see about posting the files so someone else can test it with different chipsets later.

[donh]

That sound good. I will test it. Is it a patchfile for the DVD? That would be quite small I think.

Thanks again

Don

[ressof]

I can also test it. Im am going to install JAS 10.4.7 repack on a sata drive so this would be perfect

[Black Knight]

Here are the files you need.

Files

download each of them, extract the zip file and copy them to the DVD

The Extensions.mkext goes in /system/library/ on the DVD.

The Asus.A8R32.MVP.pkg goes in /system/installation/packages/

The OSInstall.dist goes in /system/installation/packages/OSInstall.mpkg/Contents/

That should be it. Burn the DVD, reboot and hope for the best.

Paul