nvidia raid , installation / vista

[dewdrinker19]

Hey guys,

 

You have always helped me in the past and after looking and searching for about an hour I can't seem to find a definite answer to my problem (if there even is one)

 

I bought a new computer. I have 3 SATA drives in it as of right now. 2 RAIDED to form one big drive and the other is just a raid by itself. I installed Vista on this machine and was originally going to have the 2 raided and the third hard drive by itself. But Vista couldn't see the third drive until I made it a raid. After that everything was fine.

 

I am now trying to install OSX86 (I have JaS 10.4.7 Disk) and it simply can't see any of my drives. I was considering reformatting my 3rd drive so it isn't a raid and maybe the installer can see it, but the kicker is that NONE of my SATA drives are seen even in the bios. They all say not detected. I'm so lost it is insane...

 

I have an ASUS M2N/M2N DH motherboard.

 

My last issue was just bringing over an old IDE hard drive to install on. I have to install it on the same IDE ribbon as my dvd drive because there is only one place on my motherboard for IDE connections. But if I do that the computer won't even boot up at all. It just hangs on the motherboard's little logo screen.

 

Any help is greatly appreciated!

[shoarthing]

1) OS X will *not* install to any form of onboard 'firmware RAID' volume.

2) you *must* enter the BIOS, disable any form of 'firmware RAID' [NVRAID in your case], & set all/any SATA ports to AHCI [or perhaps legacy/IDE] mode for OS X to see 'em & their attached HDD(s).

3) before any of this; go to the HCL & check out JaS 10.4.7 compatibility with the NV 430 chipset . . .

 

Good luck

[dewdrinker19]

I looked and it seems there are about a bajillion issues. This will be a nightmare for me won't it...

 

I'm gonna grab an IDE drive from my old computer tonight and throw it in there to see what happens. (I think yesterday I messed up with master and slave jumpers)

 

I'm almost willing to buy a new mobo for this setup if I can't get this working. I REALLY wanted a dual boot with OSX and Vista when I'm done. Argh. Thank you for the simple and straight forward reply.

 

I'm afraid to disable the raids because then Vista can't see the drives, lol. I'll work on it though, thanks again for the info and reply!

[dewdrinker19]

OK, I got my IDE drive working and will attempt to install on it tomorrow. Is it possible to let OSX see the raid after I have installed and have it running on my IDE drive? I'm going to try to run parallels on this machine. I'm not concerned as to how well it will work. It's more of a "can I even accomplish this?" kind of thing haha.

 

Any help on having getting OSX to read the raids AFTER I install would be great! (If this is even possible either)

[shoarthing]

1) There is no possibility of any kind that OS X will be able to see, let alone read from or write to, your 'firmware RAID' volumes.

 

'Firmware RAID' of any kind from any manufacturer requires BIOS support & kernel-mode/real-mode drivers [the sort of thing that gets installed at the 'F6' stage when installing Windows] in order for a volume to be bootable.

 

OS X does not have *any* kernel-mode support for any form of 'firmware RAID' [bar, perhaps, LSI's FusionMPT], & requires at the BIOS level any SATA ports & their attached HDDs to be either in 'legacy IDE' or (preferably) AHCI mode to see the things. This means that you must disable any & all 'firmware RAID' support in the BIOS before you can install OS X.

 

2) OS X can use [be installed to & boot from] real hardware RAID volumes: hardware RAID is 'transparent' [its function is driverless to all & any OS].

 

3) Most modern OS' can create, once installed, 'software RAID' volumes from sets of physical drives excluding that drive to which the OS is installed. These volumes cannot be booted from [by any OS including the one which created them], & cannot be seen, read from or written to by any other OS.

 

. . . since there's little or no performance advantage to consumer-level 'firmware RAID' anyway, unless you stream large contiguous files from one RAID0 volume to another [ideally each on a separate controller], I would suggest you abandon this squalid cludge from winworld.

 

If you need the safety of cheap mirrored RAID - 'RAID1' - for your boot-volume, I suggest you look for a mobo with the Sil4723 'steelvine' SATA-splitter onboard: this cunning scheme splits one SATA port to two, with the 4723 coping with the striping/mirroring, & is transparent [ie is effectively = to real hardware RAID]. There is a performance hit.

 

Good luck

[dewdrinker19]

That's all I needed to know. Thank you very much.

 

I got OSX running but has no sound, no LAN support (always says cable unplugged), also when I go to get the info "about this mac" the whole screen just flashes and it opens the finder. Is it worth my time trying to find things to fix all this or is my mobo just one of the ones where these things simply don't work?

 

If this is just an incompatible mobo issue is there anywhere that has information on a mobo for AMD that is working 100% or do they all have setbacks and what not?

 

Thanks so much for your help! Man I love this forum.