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Tried so many ways to get around the SATA thing

midlandskatecom
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midlandskatecom
midlandskatecom
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Okay so a little over a week ago I ordered a SATA to PATA converter so I could hook up a PATA hard drive to my PC so I could install OSX86 and much to my dismay, and sadly, my luck as well, it didn't work. It's recognizing the drive as a SATA drive and then as if to add insult to injury, it's not showing up at all under the OSX installer.

 

I almost bought an external enclosure for a PATA drive, but I wanted to check here to see if that would work. I only want the PATA so I can install on it, and then I'll move my stuff over to my SATA drive but I really just want to atleast get OSX up and running, ya know?

 

So can someone please give me the cheapest and best advice?

MoiX
MoiX
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From what I can tell the SATA to PATA converter was never going to work as your problem must lie with the lack of driver support for the SATA controller which irrespective as to whether you have a PATA (on a convertor) or SATA HD attached it, is still SATA.

 

There are a few work in progress projects on the go atm to improve SATA support particullarly for nforce users but as you don't mention which chipset your motherboard uses (& thus its SATA controller) your likihood of getting a answer (good or bad) won't really improve till you mention the chipset?

 

fyi, last night for the first time I managed to get OSX up & running on my nforce 630a chipset (MCP68) with SATA drive but I had to modify someones (i forget the developer..sorry) AppleVIAATA.kext* plist entries with my own SATA device IDs, install it first with VMWare onto a HD partition then configure dual boot. Its still not perfect as I still need to get at least my network card working, consider flashing my 512MB gfx card (to get other resolutions) then hold out hope that someone will one day develop an audio driver for me to try :(

 

* I know with VIA in the driver title you wouldn't think at first glance that driver was ever going to work on an nforce mobo but I spotted other replies with nforce4 & iirc 430 chipsets that had some sucess with it so i thought might as well give it a go on mine and it did

midlandskatecom
midlandskatecom
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Luckily, I have an nVidia nForce chipset... I believe its the 410 or 430, I don't remember, I Just know that in the tubgirl download page on TPB it mentions my chipset specifically as not having SATA support and telling me to use PATA and thats how I know my problem was using SATA.

 

Now, I've made an install to my iPod for my OSX86 version but I think something that apple did with the iPod hard drive made it so it wasn't able to boot from that. I was wondering if getting an external usb hard drive, or an enclosure at the very least, would let me be able to do this?

night_rider
night_rider
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fyi, last night for the first time I managed to get OSX up & running on my nforce 630a chipset (MCP68) with SATA drive but I had to modify someones (i forget the developer..sorry) AppleVIAATA.kext* plist entries with my own SATA device IDs, install it first with VMWare onto a HD partition then configure dual boot.

 

I have the nforce 630a chipset and would be very interested in details of how you got this working and/or the current projects underway to make SATA work with this chipset. I posted a thread regarding this and someone suggested tubgirl's release but it also did not see my SATA drives.

 

Links would be great so I don't hijack the thread.

MoiX
MoiX
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I don't think this could be considered a hijack if I give a expand a little more on how I got my sata working, but as mentioned, I used VMware to install OSX initially but instead of using a virtual image HD, I set VMware to directly use the 2nd (30GB) partition on my SATA drive (Vista is on Partition #1) which although I think this isn't really recommended, I thought it worth the risk.....I'd already formated this with the vista diskutil to a HPFS filesystem and iirc set it active - it might be wise to set you main windows partition active again after the vmware osx install but before rebooting windows.

 

Then, I simply aimed to get OSX up & running in VMWare which as I think VMWare made my partition appear as either an IDE or SCSI drive to OSX, installed nicely using a 10.4.10 iso mounted in Vista with Demon Tools (not VMWare)

 

Once OSX was installed in VMware, I could access my Vista ntfs drive by browsing from OSX to my host PCs (Vista) shared folders via Network (which also worked in vmwares bridged mode). The 10.4.10 also allowed mounted a small FAT32 partition I created on the SATA drive as a place to exchange kexts that I edited in Windows for conveinience.

 

The kext that got SATA working was the original AppleVIAATA.kext that i copied from OSX (while running in vmware) to my Fat32 drive, and edited in the 2 device ID's (under the SATA section) of my the SATA/ATA controllers which iirc are 0x055010de & 0x056010de.

 

Then copied this modified kext back to the OSX desktop, removed the AppleVIAATA.kext from extensions to trash (u have to remove first as overwriting doesn't seem to work), then dragged the modified copy to the extensions folder <-- some of this process requires you to authenticate with a password.

 

Once, done, open a terminal and run the various sudo commands

 

Open BCEdit and create a generic OSX 86 boot entry (you may or may not have to run Vista/XP boot repair after this...i forget)

 

Reboot the PC, you should have the BCEdit menu there, so choose OSX and depending on how your gfx card is handled by the nv*.kext's (I assume you use the onboard 7030 gfx?) you hopefully should at least get it to start booting from the SATA but it may hang on he gfx loading if you haven't edited in your Gfx cards device ID's

 

I've uploaded my modified kext's for you to try (at your own risk). This archive contains

1) my AppleVIAATA.kext already modded with correct device ID's for my sata controler but you should double check yours are the same

2) modified NVD*.kext & geforce.kext's with the device id of my 7600GS graphics card (I dont use the onboard gfx) which is 039210de. You should check the device id of the onboard gfx card and modify the plists to suit)

3) NVInject.kext which I think you'll possibly need to get the gfx working correctly (no need to edit this plist)

4) I've included a set_permissions.command file which takes all the hassle out of doing all that terminal cmd line stuff for the above kexts (after you've copied them to the extensions folder)

 

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/kernaldb/OSX.zip (5mb)

 

[edit]

Almost forgot to say, but even though i have the device id of SATA ports 3 & 4 (my DVD drive is also sata on port 4), OSX for some reason isn't seeing my DVD drive when I boot natively. I suspect if I move the drive to sata port 2 (device id 055010de) it might well work.

 

For Networking & sound you'll need something other than the onboard offering

USB and FW seems to work fine

 

Good luck and let me/us know if you have any joy or any further improvements

night_rider
night_rider
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MoiX the response is much appreciated but that is a bit more than I'm prepared to do for OSX. I'm just thinking outloud here but wouldn't it be preferable to edit the kext on the install CD to recognize the SATA drive during installation? I'm the first to say I'm new again to the Mac OS. One of my reasons for the install was to learn it again. I dropped out to Windows after OS9.

 

Alternatively I've heard of others installing to a PATA drive and copying to SATA. That sounds much easier to my ears as well.

MoiX
MoiX
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Posted

it would be preferable to inject the modified kexts into the ISO then burn it but I haven't got a clue how to do that and while I know with some other types of windows iso's there utils that can do this sort of thing (ppf?), I'm not sure its easy to do in windows due to the 'funny' format of the OSX iso/file system when in window ie browse a burned OSX CD in windows and there's not much there, browse it while in OSX and all the files are there.

 

I guess, if your dvd/cd drive is PATA, then you may well be able to install straight to pata, then add the kexts (as in the zip linked above but double checking your device id's), then ghost it to a sata partition.

 

The boot loader once its on the sata is probably something you'll have to figure out once you have your sata disk/partition with the OSX installed, but BCEDit (if you use Vista as your main OS), is easy to with although I do end up having select OSX on both the Vista bootloader then Darwin bootloader when i want OSX and while I'm sure there's a way round it I haven't risked changing this small anoyance.

 

If you do find a way to inject these files to an ISO (from Windows) then be sure to post it

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