The old RAID question

toolshed · October 3, 2009

Its been a while since I did any hardware/setup (I've actually been using applications - yay!),

but last time I looked into it, RAID implementation was not straightforward on a dual boot system (Vista/Leopard).

I'm nearly at the hardware upgrade stage so I'm revisiting RAID. Ideally, I want RAID 0 on my dual-boot-to-be W7 / Leopard (possibly Snow Leopard) sytstem (either a GA-G33-DSR2 with E6600, or GA EX58-DS4 with i7 940, and a couple of Samsung F1's). Obviously, now I'm an appliction-head, I'm not up to speed with hardware things...

I found this info. below, from Grant Pannell (thanks bro) - can anyone decode it for me...

It seems to offer the possibility of Windows hardware RAID, but, only Apple software RAID?

I've been working hard at making my hackintosh "perfect". This seems to be yet another breakthrough that hadn't been possible before...I don't know why, it's such an easy hack.

Basically, when using your SATA controller in RAID mode, both Leopard and Snow Leopard will refuse to boot with "waiting for root device" (as the device is inaccessible).

This means you can now use Hardware RAID...well for Windows/Linux at least. I am unsure if you can use a RAID volume and install Snow Leopard to it, however, you should be able to use Snow Leopard on a single drive and still keep your Windows RAID intact. Basically it means one less BIOS change each time you want to jump into OSX and that you'll be able to access files on your Windows/Linux RAID volumes without rebooting. If you really want OSX RAID, I don't see anything stopping you from using Apple's Software RAID while your SATA controller is in RAID mode.

So, how to? This isn't the most Vanilla way, I'm sure there's a better way of doing this...but I'll come up with that later.

Simply open up /System/Library/Extensions/AppleAHCIPort.kext/Contents/ and edit the Info.plist

Under the ICH10AHCI key, you can either:

a) Replace IOPCIPrimaryMatch or

Duplicate the whole key/dict and rename it ICH10RAID and then change the IOPCIPrimaryMatch

Either way, you need to add 0x28228086 to IOPCIPrimaryMatch

It will look something like (after you've made the changes):

<dict>

<key>CFBundleIdentifier</key>

<string>com.apple.driver.AppleAHCIPort</string>

<key>Chipset Name</key>

<key>IOClass</key>

<string>AppleAHCI</string>

<key>IOPCIPrimaryMatch</key>

<key>IOProbeScore</key>

<key>IOProviderClass</key>

<string>IOPCIDevice</string>

<key>Vendor Name</key>

<string>Intel</string>

</dict>

Save it, Run Kext Utility, or whatever you use to repair permissions.

Now, on my machine Chameleon RC1 with PC_EFI 10.2 refused to boot. I kept getting boot1: error. For this to work you need to install Chameleon RC1/PC_EFI 10.2 to a USB drive then use the USB drive to boot your Snow Leopard partition. I'm unsure, but perhaps the next version of Chameleon, PC_EFI or BootThink may not have this error, lets hope!

When I did this, Snow Leopard booted....BUT...I kept getting Console error messages to do with AppleUSBEHCI and this seemed to disable the use of my keyboard and mouse clicks. So if anyone knows how to fix that, please post here.

Please test this. Honestly, I don't know if you create a RAID Volume that maybe OSX will not detect the RAID and simply show two drives. I haven't had time to fully test this yet. What I can confirm is that OSX boots SUCCESSFULLY in SATA-RAID mode with ICH10R.

Oh, I did this on a Gigabyte GA-EP45-EXTREME.

On the 3rd of September I reported progress of using ICH10R SATA Controller in RAID mode, which would allow you to keep your Windows RAID active without having to change BIOS settings to boot to Snow Leopard. You might even be able to install Snow Leopard to a HARDWARE RAID volume...but I haven't tested this yet.

But good news, this all works perfectly now. Here's some details on how I did it with my setup:

Windows 7 installed on one hard disk (Windows 7 Boot Manager (BCD))

Ubuntu 9.04 installed on one hard disk (GRUB)

Snow Leopard 10.6.0 installed on one hard disk (Chameleon RC2 with PC_EFI 10.2, by me )

Essentially, you'll need GRUB to multiboot the Chameleon boot file. This is how to get around the boot1: error reported by the official Darwin bootloader that's included with Chameleon RC2. Installing GRUB to a USB drive probably won't work, though I haven't tested it...you may very well get USBEHCI Errors like I reported in my previous post about this.

So, basically...

Install Ubuntu with GRUB to the MBR...on a completely separate drive
Copy the Chameleon RC2 + PC_EFI 10.2 boot file to /boot/ on your Ubuntu partition
Edit the menu.lst for GRUB to include a Snow Leopard entry
Boot to your Ubuntu drive, then choose your Snow Leopard entry

What you should have in your menu.lst for the Snow Leopard is something like:

title Apple Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6

rootnoverify (hd2,1)

kernel (hd0,0)/boot/chameleon_rc2_pc_efi10.2_boot biosdev=81

Where hd2,1 is the drive number and partition number of Snow Leopard (remember if you have a GPT partition table, partition 0 will be the EFI partition, so use partition 1)

hd0,0 will be the drive number and partition number of your Ubuntu Linux install

/boot/chameleon_rc2_pc_efi10.2_boot is the path to the boot file you put in /boot/ on your Ubuntu partition

biosdev=81 is passed to Chameleon to determine the correct volume to boot. Mess around with this value...it might be 80, 81, 82 or 83. If you don't choose the right one Chameleon will not detect your com.apple.Boot.plist and not load your EFI strings.

And finally....to enable ICH10R RAID mode you should grab and install to your /Extra/Extensions folder AHCIPortInjector.kext and ATAPortInjector.kext. These two kexts are included in the Chameleon RC2/PC_EFI 10.2 package that I linked earlier (in the packages/Kexts folder).

Have fun with Snow Leopard and ICH10R

If you need the link:

http://digitaldj.net/2009/09/05/ich10r-in-...leopard-part-2/

The old RAID question

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