10.4.10 on a Gigabyte P35-DS4

[gwaedin]

Hi all,

 

after some reading I do my first post here.

 

Just installed with help from a friend a 10.4.10 on my system.

 

Gigabyte P35-DS4 rev. 2

Intel E4500

2048 MB RAM

NVidia GeForce7300LE

2 HD SATA 250GB each

1 HD PATA 80GB

PATA DVD-RW LG

 

The original idea is to have a RAID 1 Windows XP system running on the twin SATA disks and MacOSX on the 80 GB.

To do the install we plugged one of the 250GB in the first orange slot and the other in the purple slot.

Set channels 0-3 in Native mode and switched on AHCI mode from BIOS.

 

Everything went really smooth, actually I could install 10.4.8 from the PATA DVD (which was quite as a surprise as we'd expected trouble with that). The system is working nicely after patching to 10.4.10, just a couple of minor issues:

- LAN not working because XP was disabling the card after shutdown, checked the proper box in Windows PM options and successfully patched with RTL1xxx_1.02

- audio had to be patched with alc889a

 

Fine. The problem I have is moving the install to the PATA drive. Tried the following:

- Carbon Copy Cleaner of MACOSX partition

- writing a DMG image file of the partition after booting from JaS 10.4.8 DVD and the restoring the image on target drive

- doing a new install directly on the PATA drive (which IS recognized, install seems to work perfectly!)

and then setting Startup from the PATA drive in System Preferences

 

In every case I end up with a chain booting error when I remove the SATA drive with MacOSX.

To me it looks like MacOSX can't boot off a PATA drive on my system.

Does any of you has some suggestions?

Do I have to get a SATA drive in plave of the PATA to make things work or is there a workaround of sorts?

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[gwaedin]

I also tried disconnecting the SATAs and leaving only the IDE disk to see if the system could boot but nothing happens.

It's quite strange, because I don't get any error messages such as OS not found.

Simply, the post screen stays there after the DMI pool line.

 

I hope somebody can give me some help... I'd like to know if what I'm trying to do is not possible or if there might be some simple MBR trick that would make things work...

[gwaedin]

PROBLEM SOLVED

 

I tried BSD'ing the MBR to solve the issue but still nothing.

I doing that rebooting with the JaS DVD but I found out that even the DVD wasn't working, giving a boot.plist error.

Uh-uh. It wasn't doing that in the first place, as I DID install MacOSX.

Tried messing around with master/slave settings to no avail.

 

Then I changed BIOS settings for the Gigabyte SATAII controller and that did the trick.

When I installed it first I put it on IDE, then I moved it to RAID/IDE because I wanted to set up a RAID array using that controller on the SATA drives. I put it back to plain IDE and still the system wasn't booting off the PATA drive.

However, after reinstalling MacOSX on it the installation successfully completed and now the systems works.

I can boot from the WinXP disk and select MacOSX as the starting OS.

 

Hope it helps somebody else.

[99558]

Hi, does the OS see both cores with this set up?

[gwaedin]

Yes it does, both cores are reported, running at 2.21 GHz. I will overclock the system to 2.9 GHz, already tried that setting and had no problems at all with 1066MHz FSB. I have a couple of nice PC6400 1 GB modules bought for the purpose.

 

Moreover, now that I have everything installed properly I can put my SATA drives wherever I want (i.e. on the ICH9 or Jmicron controller) and OSX boots nicely whatever the controller settings are (i.e. IDE/AHCI/RAID).

 

Now I only need to rebuild the RAID1 array. I'm DriveImaging my Windows partitions (System, swap, data and backup) to the IDE disk FAT32 partition (I partitioned the 80 GB with a 30GB HFS+ for the OS and the rest as a FAT32 for file exchange). Then I will create the array of the Jmicron controller I think, so that I can swith off the ICH9 controller - the less you've got, the better things work.