Areca RAID Controller for boot volume

[osxster]

Hello,

 

I have a prior hackintosh that I am rebuilding, while attempting to use a new Areca 1280 ML RAID controller. I am trying to use the IATKOS L2 distribution to attempt to make things a little easier. The machine is an ASUS PH5-DH Deluxe which I use to run Leopard on. The IATKOS appears to have no Areca support, so I have come up with some work-arounds which allows me to install Lion on my Boot drive, but I still cannot boot after the install.

 

What I have done is boot the IATKOS distribution, with a USB flash drive installed, I go into a terminal, type kextload ArcMSR.kext. The Areca then comes up as an available drive. I then run diskutil create an MBR volume, install Lion. Then when the system is done with the install, I boot the IATKOS DVD, go into terminal, kextload ArcMSR.kext, then I copy the ArcMSR.kext into my /Volumes/<system volume>/System/Library/Extensions, reboot and when the system is trying to start (with the -v option), it eventually hangs and I get the error eventually:

 

Still waiting for root device

 

i am using the ArcMSR-1.3.4 which is the latest one on the Areca site for Lion. I even tried deleting my kernelcache to see if they helps. I don't see any evidence that the kext is loading and am not sure what needs to be done to get this kext to execute at boot time. Given that I can manually load this kext during my install makes me think it is compatible.

 

Any help would be really appreciated as I have not found anything on the internet other than a couple people stating it works.

 

osxster

[Middleman]

Hi there,

 

I'm in the midst of building an Areca based Hackintosh myself, but it's by no means an easy feat.

 

I've just finished with an almost perfect-build Sandy Bridge Hackintosh myself using an Asus P8Z68 V Pro board with an Intel Core i5 2500K chip.

Booting in with ######/###### with a copy of Lion 10.7, I've managed to get everything going including the network card, sound (full 5.1) and graphics

(MSI GTXZ 560Ti 448 running CI and QE). My instructions are found on the last page here > http://www.osx86.net...&id=2074&page=7

(which incidentally is the link to the drivers for my graphics card).

 

Anyways back to the RAID, I assume to get it going you need to get at least Lion 10.7.2 on the install because according to this link > http://forums.macrum...=1174773&page=2

using Lion 10.7 alone is a disaster for Areca cards because the initial built-in RAID driver in this build caused the RAIDs to be broken up and unreadable, resulting in loss of data on ANY attached Areca RAID (as one user showed). You need to update to Lion 10.7.2 to get the proper OSX Areca support.

 

To do this I would suggest you run ###### installed on a single drive with Lion 10.7 (it's much better than iATKos I think) and then with the latest version of ######, combo-update your drive to 10.7.2 or 10.7.3. Once that's done and you've checked that Lion works (and you've install the necessary working network card drivers for Internet access) you should be able to install your Areca drivers on that drive for the RAID as this link shows > http://www.appleknac...om/archives/309 and then run the Areca software via the terminal to format the drive. But you may not be able to boot from the Areca RAID, as according to the specs the 1280 ML doesn't support it.