Just thought I'd share my experience here. I have a 9650 3Ware card that I have been dying to boot off of. Initially I had a separate drive hooked directly to the motherboard and used the uphuck 1.3 install. From there I installed the 3ware drivers available from their website (look for the Sidecar Drivers.) I did the following to boot (all commands run as root/sudo):

1. Mounted the uphuck ISO read/write.
2. Copied the Extensions.mkext file out of the uphuck ISO.
3. Used mkextunpack to split the Extensions.mkext file out into it's separate files.
4. Added the AMCC driver available from the 3ware image mentioned above (packages->drivers->macos->Intel->AMCC3ware9000.kext.)
5. Used kextcache to make a new Extensions.mkext file.
6. Copied the new Extensions.mkext file back into the uphuck ISO.
7. umounted the the ISO. Burned it.
8. Once booted I was able to see the 3ware RAID 10 I had created.
9. Partitioned as MBR, but newfs complained about not divisible by 4.
10. Fired up fdisk, took the size of the partition, divided by 4, dropped the decimals places and created a new partition flagged to boot.
11. Back in Disk Utility formatted the partition as HFS+ Journaled.
12. Back to the installer for an install.
13. Booted back up off of the single drive, ran a quick repair permissions on the RAID array and then ran the 3ware installer on the RAID array.
14. Reboot after some BIOS changes onto the array!
15. Profit.

Anyhoo, I suppose that making a package out of the 3ware installer and adding that to the install DVD would be better, but I haven't gotten that excited yet. I would recommend that anyone making any new install DVDs add the 3ware driver and the 3ware package as an option as it makes for a wicked fast disk. This also works with the PCI-X cards (at least the 9550.) YMMV, thanks for all the great posts that helped me along.

FWIW my specs:
Intel Starlake MB respin for 45nm support
2x3.2GHz Quad-core 45nm procs
32GB RAM
6x1TB Seagate SATA drives RAID 10 off of 3ware 9650SE-8LPML
st00pid loud case

Very nice. I can already see the audio/video enthusiasts jumping all over this

Umm . . . wow. That is awesome.

Huge, huge props. Checking prices on that card as I type this.

What is ur mobo? I guess that you are using Intel Xeons? Are the 45nm Xeons allready out? Is it a server system or what?
U do video editing?

Btw very nice of you...

@justroach

I also have this raid card, but I don't want to boot off of it.

Would I just have to add the AMCC3ware9000.kext after my osx install to get Leopard to see my raid? I shouldn't have to do everything you did since I don't want to boot from the raid? Right???

Thanks!

I have a 9650SE 8 port card too - tried simply copying the KEXT file to the extensions folder - that didn't work. Then installed it using these instructions here:

http://grafikdesign.wordpress.com/2008/02/...ll-a-kext-file/

WOrked!

I can now see a single drive attached to the controller but not my RAID0 AV array - but this maybe to do with how it's setup in XP?

I have a highpoint 3510 card
would the procedure be the same?

Not sure - possibly if you have the right driver?

Justroach - good work, a great success! I have a Raid 5 array running on a 9650 under my XP installation, NTFS obviously, that'd I love to see under 10.5.2. As I don't need to boot off it, I tried installing the Sidecar drivers from AMCC's site. They installed successfully but OSX still can't see my drives...any ideas?

I just found this thread today and got my 9650SE working in 10.5.2. I downloaded the installer image from 3ware's site but then I just installed the .kext file. It is located inside the image at /packages/drivers/macos/intel/AMCC3ware9000.kext. I used Kext Helper b7 to install the kext. It took about 15 seconds after installing the kext for my Raid 5 to show up All 3tb of raid goodness is available in my OS X install now

This is VERY interesting. A couple quick questions: Do you all suppose that this will work with all 9000 series cards? And for those running this setup right now, what's the performance like in OS X?

Seems like it either doesn't like 10.5.4 or it doesn't like my 9500S Card cause after install I get the Please restart Black Screen every time.

Using a Asus P5WDG2-WS mobo.

@eleazar -> pretty nice drive collection

any one have recommendations on a cheaper raid controller than the 9650SE?

also, what is the highest number of working SATA connections on a motherboard one can hope for? which boards are the best bets? ...would be nice to not have the expense of the controller card, but then again a cheaper motherboard would free up some money for one.

thanks!

I just got my older 9590SE 8 port SATA (PCIe 4x) running with the sidecar drivers.

It looks like many of the 3ware cards share the same device id/drivers.
For instance the 9590SE I have has the same device id as a 9550.

The device ID's that are supported in the 3ware 9000 kext are:

Vendor: 0x13c1
DevID: 0x1002, 0x1003, 0x1004.

0x1002 = 9000 Series
0x1003 = 9550SX / 9590SE Series
0x1004 = 9650SE Series

If you don't have a 3ware card on hand to check you might need to google around a bit to see what device id a particular one uses.