Wicked SATA/AHCI Breakthrough on ASROCK AM2XLI-eSATA2

[orByte]

Hi all,

 

Summary

Osx86: HotISO/Jas 10.4.6

MB Bios Version: P1.30

MB BIOS Settings: SATA Enabled, SATA Phy Enabled, SATA type: AHCI

HD/IDE Settings: S.M.A.R.T. Enabled

HDs: 1x SEAGATE ST3800113AS (from the original powermac - actually this is SATA 1.5)

1x HITACHI HDT722520DLA380 (SATA 3.0, NCQ etc)

 

SATA Ports Installation: 4 CHANNELS.

RED: IDE3-Master (AppleAHCIPort @0)

BLACK: IDE4-Slave (AppleAHCIPort @2)

ORANGE: IDE4-Master (AppleAHCIPort @1)

BLUE: IDE4-Slave (AppleAHCIPort @3)

 

 

TO GET SATA:

Install as follows:

RED, ORANGE, RED+ORANGE, RED+BLACK, ORANGE+BLUE, etc.

 

I.E. You MUST always first install on a MASTER. Once you install on a MASTER then you can also install on the SLAVE of that MASTER.

 

 

In theory, putting two internal drives on RED + ORANGE, should set you up for two hot-pluggable eSATA drives. Note: I have not tested this yet.

 

 

 

discussion

I had gone off thinking I needed to rewrite the SATA driver, then gone off on a tangent re-compiling the IOUSBFamily, made a few alterations and ended up completely hosing the system.

 

I decided to take some time off to figure out enabling the 3G of the Hitachi SATA drive under windows. Strangely enough, the Hitachi DOS driver tool v2.03 was not recognizing any sata drives either.

 

Then through some strange providence the breakthrough happened: I was reading forums about SATA support on DOS, and that this should be recognised but that IDEs > 2 may not register. Looking at the ASROCK bios (flashed to 1.30) of the MB I saw that the 4 color coded SATA channels are mapped as follows:

 

IDE3 Master: Red, IDE3 Slave: Black, IDE4 Master: Orange, IDE4 Slave: Blue.

 

The manufacturer had recommended reserving 'Orange' and 'Red' for the external ports, which I had not been using.

 

When I switched the SATA drive to the 'Orange' (i.e., IDE4 Master) - The Hitachi tool recognised it! AND When I left the drive on IDE4 Master and booted into OSx86 - the drive was recognised as well. It does NOT show up in 'About Mac'. But certainly it does show up in the Disk Utility and also via

ioreg

.

 

Finally, I removed the OSx86 (SATA) USB drive and connected it to IDE Master4 (SATA ORANGE), and put the Windows one on IDE Slave 4 (SATA BLUE), and rebooted, and guess what? Now, BOTH drives appeared under ioreg, and all mounted properly to the desktop.

 

Final result: SATA/AHCI works on this board with this set-up and is FASTXXX too!