3 replies to this topic

[xiv]

Hi all,

I' trying to get my Digitus 30104 4-Port SATA II PCI-E card running under Lion 10.7.2

First of all, here's some info on the card:
http://www.digitus.i...-port-ds-30104/

It uses a Marvell 88SX7042 chip. There is no OSX support.

The card appears to be identical to these cards according to specs and images:

• Rosewill RC-218
  http://www.rosewill....oductDetail.htm
  
• Startech PEXSATA24E
  http://eu.startech.c...PCIe~PEXSATA24E

I found two drivers for OSX that come with cards that use the same chip:

• sonnet tempo sata e4i
  http://www.sonnettec...o_sata_e4i.html
  This card looks very similar (but misses the 2 eSATA ports and the jumpers to activate them). Furthermore, some review on Newegg mentions, that a Rosewill RC-218 (see above) is detected in Windows 7 as this card.
  
• HighPoint RocketRaid
  http://www.hptmac.com/
  They have some cards of the 23xx series, which use a 88SX7042 and have native support in Lion (HighPointRR.kext). However, none of them looks similar.

I followed this guide on kext editing:
http://wiki.osx86pro...t_Patching_List

I figured out the PNPID is 0x704211AB

First attempt: Modifying HighPointRR.kext
See attachment for resulting kext.
With the PNPID, the card is detected.
Unfortunately, connected SATA hard drives are not detected.
I didn't find any errors in the system log files.

Second attempt: Modifying SonnetSATA.kext
I extracted the SonnetSATA.kext from the driver packet that came from the official website.
http://www.sonnettec...amp;action=b384
Apart from injecting the PNPID, I removed the secondary device match stuff from the info.plist.
See attachment for resulting kext.
This version detects the card and connected hard drives.
The log says:

kernel: SonnetSATA::init 2.2.6, © 2004-2010 Sonnet Technologies, Inc.
kernel: SonnetSATA::detectDeviceType@0: Marvell 88SX7042 detected Disk Drive ST2000DL003-9VT166 CC32 6YD0GV3L

However, the problem is that the drives appear as "not initialized".
(I tested with a drive GUID and a single HFS+ partition with data and a drive with GUID and a single NTFS partition, which worked fine under Windows 7)
When I use DiskUtil, to initialize and partition the drive (GUID and single HFS+ partition), it gets stuck at "waiting for volumes to be displayed" (or similar - it's a rough translation from the German UI)
No errors are reported.

At this point I a stuck. I got the feeling, I am really close. It's probably only some minor tweak of the settings - but I have no idea where and what to change.

Any suggestions are welcome. Perhaps some of you owns one of these cards and could try him/herself.

cheers,
xiv

Attached Files

•  HighPointRR.kext.zip   521.62K   11 downloads
•  SonnetSATA.kext.zip   229.15K   15 downloads

[xiv]

I just verified that the card is working fine under Windows 7 with the current driver provided by SonnetTech.
So where's the problem in Lion? I also tried earlier driver version (2.2.1 is the 1st that supports Lion) but all with the same result.

[xiv]

According to this post:
http://forums.macrum...d.php?t=1249087
the problem could actually be the combination of the driver with 10.7.2.

[wonkywonky]

@xiv
Any progress on this front?