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Well here is my report on the A8N-SLi premium sata controller.

 

I added an sata drive into the system in hopes that I could transfer the OS over to it for faster HDD speeds. The OS boots fine and the drive is recoqnized. I am able to partition it just fine using the diskutilites and setup an HFS+ filesystem on it.

 

Problem is that after accessing the drive for more then a couple of minutes, the entire system locks up, completely. I've tried two different SATA drives, both WDC 250GB.

 

Has anyone else had this problem or has anyone got the SATA to successfully work on the ASUS A8N-SLi Premium (or other) motherboards?

 

~Nem

I'm presuming you're using either the Tubgirl 10.4.8 AMD SSE3 image, or the just-released JaS 10.4.8 universal image. Both images does NOT work with nForce 4 SATA. You will be able to see it during install and partition it, but after install it will crash and corrupt any data on those drives. My SATA drives were visible during install, but they are not detected in OS X; I wouldn't mind reading only off the drives, so as long as the data is safe and won't corrupt.

 

The only way to install OS X on an nForce 4 system is to install it onto a PATA drive.

Edited by spikeh

That's tubegirl. It really dosn't matter about the OS X version or who made the disk. Nforce4 sata wont work. But since you have a Premium board, It has a seconadry sata controller. SIL 3114. This one will work if you add your device and vender id to viaata.kext. Search the forums for 3114 and you will find some more info.

Someone sent me a pm about this same issue. I have (had...my OS X install is down) working SATA through the nforce4 drivers.

 

Here's what I did:

 

sudo -s
nano -w /System/Library/Extensions/IOATAFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleVIAATA.kext/Contents/Info.plist

under

<key>VIA SATA Controller</key>

change

<key>IOPCIPrimaryMatch</key>
<string> .... </string>

to

<key>IOPCIPrimaryMatch</key>
<string> .... 0x005410de 0x005510de</string>

chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/IOATAFamily.kext/ 
chmod -R 755 /System/Library/Extensions/IOATAFamily.kext/ 
rm /System/Library/Extensions.mkext
rm /System/Library/Extensions.kextcache

I don't know about write support (it was geared towards read support on my NTFS drives), but it seemed to work fine for me.

 

Hope it works for you guys!

Edited by phoenix3200

Update:

 

While I haven't tried to get the nForce4 controller working with the above code, I was able to get the SI controller to work properly!

 

So I cloned OS X over to it, which went perfectly. HOWEVER I am completely unable to boot from the SATA drive. I'm not sure if there is anything special that I need to do to make the drive bootable after cloning it, the software I said indicated that it made it bootable. I even tried hooking it up to the XP box and setting the partition on it to active, but still no luck.

 

 

Can someone tell me how I go about making this drive bootable? The startup disk in the preferences panel is useless, I read somewhere that is due to the EFI / BIOS issues.

 

Thanks again

 

~Nem

Yea startup disk, dosn't work on the bios. I think i rember reading about this. You might need to do something special. I dunoo about the 3114 but there lot's of articles about it. But i think if you used a standard os x clone tool it probley didn't make it x86 bios bootable only mac efi/openfirmware. You probley just need to install the darwin bootloader again. And the code above will not work it's the same trick everyone else used. That kext will detect the drives, and you could read/or write, but in system.log the IOATAControoler blocking bus messages. The files will corrupt, and if you install os x it will eventually corrupt so bad to not boot. One my harddrives cant even get thru the install. And the other lasted like two week's. Safe bet to no even use nforce4 sata, not even for reading.

Edited by westep23
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