bellomo Posted January 31, 2006 Share Posted January 31, 2006 Hi guys, i'm trying to install OSX86 Tiger 10.4.3 on my AMD 64 desktop pc, but unfortunately i have an ASUS A8N-E motherboard with nforce4 chipset and SATA drives. Looking around it seems that there is no way to make it work under OSX86 (infact my drive isn't recognized). Anyone knows any possible solution ???? Many thanks, b. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/8167-sata-on-nvidia-nforce4-no-hope-at-all/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
kejkz Posted January 31, 2006 Share Posted January 31, 2006 I'm sorry, but to my limited knowledge you won't be able to use SATA with nforce based mainboards. I have NF3 board with PATA and SATA and only avalible drive for instalation is my primary paralel ata drive. If you would like to install OSX now, get yourself old PATA drive! I hope i'm wrong about this! Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/8167-sata-on-nvidia-nforce4-no-hope-at-all/#findComment-50874 Share on other sites More sharing options...
jeanzeiss Posted January 31, 2006 Share Posted January 31, 2006 I'm sorry, but to my limited knowledge you won't be able to use SATA with nforce based mainboards. I have NF3 board with PATA and SATA and only avalible drive for instalation is my primary paralel ata drive. If you would like to install OSX now, get yourself old PATA drive! I hope i'm wrong about this! you are right, i have a Asus A8N-E,i can only use the ata harddisk. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/8167-sata-on-nvidia-nforce4-no-hope-at-all/#findComment-50929 Share on other sites More sharing options...
bellomo Posted February 1, 2006 Author Share Posted February 1, 2006 Thanks guys for your replies, for me there is no possibility to recover a ATA drive, only SATA. So the point is: - what is required to write a driver for this device ? - are the ones for VIA and Intel chipset so different ? - is it possible starting from those drives to port for the nforce chipset, maybe looking in nforce driver for other platform like linux ??? (are they open source ?? mmh ...) - Is there anyone working on this item ? I'm a C++ programmer with experience in Linux system, i've a 10.4.3 OsX installed on a Sony Vaio laptop with Xcode so maybe i can help comments ?? b. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/8167-sata-on-nvidia-nforce4-no-hope-at-all/#findComment-51122 Share on other sites More sharing options...
excalibur Posted February 1, 2006 Share Posted February 1, 2006 I skipped the OS X installation (well, it does not give me option, to be exact) on the internal SATA just for the reason that I had a Windows already there. From my experience, no dual boot, multiboot are trustworthy. So I end up with an external SATA box running USB to boot OS X. Works perfectly. BTW, I am using SATA and NF4 Ultra board. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/8167-sata-on-nvidia-nforce4-no-hope-at-all/#findComment-51132 Share on other sites More sharing options...
vaderd Posted February 1, 2006 Share Posted February 1, 2006 I skipped the OS X installation (well, it does not give me option, to be exact) on the internal SATA just for the reason that I had a Windows already there. From my experience, no dual boot, multiboot are trustworthy. So I end up with an external SATA box running USB to boot OS X. Works perfectly. BTW, I am using SATA and NF4 Ultra board. Hi! How is your disk access speed when using the HD with an external USB box? I tried it and disk access was horribly slow, booting took some minutes and overall performance was not really usable! Also, the HD was not recognized by the kernel until I plugged the USB cable out and in again. Using a DFI NF4 mobo too. I'm now back with an internal ATA drive over IDE and it's really fast! Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/8167-sata-on-nvidia-nforce4-no-hope-at-all/#findComment-51197 Share on other sites More sharing options...
scousi Posted February 1, 2006 Share Posted February 1, 2006 Thanks guys for your replies, for me there is no possibility to recover a ATA drive, only SATA.So the point is: - what is required to write a driver for this device ? - are the ones for VIA and Intel chipset so different ? - is it possible starting from those drives to port for the nforce chipset, maybe looking in nforce driver for other platform like linux ??? (are they open source ?? mmh ...) - Is there anyone working on this item ? I'm a C++ programmer with experience in Linux system, i've a 10.4.3 OsX installed on a Sony Vaio laptop with Xcode so maybe i can help comments ?? b. 1) Install XCODE 2) Get Darwin Source code http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/10.4.3/ There are plenty of ATA example drivers there. Look into the AppleOnboardATA. That one has more than one chipset within it. 3) Get the equivalent Linux source code from: http://www.linuxhq.com/ Find the driver used for Linux for Nforce4 ATA and cross-port it to MACOS. All the IO registers commands and addresses will be the same since it's the same PC architecture. 4) You will find a lot of similarities with all the IDE drivers in how they configure the PCI. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/8167-sata-on-nvidia-nforce4-no-hope-at-all/#findComment-51202 Share on other sites More sharing options...
vaderd Posted February 2, 2006 Share Posted February 2, 2006 Tried to compare the sources with FreeBSD and Linux drivers. Being no developer at all, I failed miserably. I found no real commons between any sources I found. But, it seems like the Nvidia SATA controller is not that different from the "standard" ATA one. The FreeBSD drivers use the same files with only some code lines dedicted to SATA. Maybe that's a point where to start. As ignorant as it may be, I tried to add the SATA device ID's into the source files, as i was done with NF3 and NF4 chipsets and recompiled the .kext wit XCode. Of course (?) it didn't work as the kernel stalled during boot. Anyway, the ATA and SATA drivers don't seem too different and maybe someone with more experience could make it work some day. In the FreeBSD drivers ATA and SATA even share the same name (CK804..) with different device ID's. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/8167-sata-on-nvidia-nforce4-no-hope-at-all/#findComment-51498 Share on other sites More sharing options...
excalibur Posted February 2, 2006 Share Posted February 2, 2006 Hi! How is your disk access speed when using the HD with an external USB box? I tried it and disk access was horribly slow, booting took some minutes and overall performance was not really usable! Also, the HD was not recognized by the kernel until I plugged the USB cable out and in again. Using a DFI NF4 mobo too.I'm now back with an internal ATA drive over IDE and it's really fast! Quite acceptable although I did not test it with xbench. The box is a USB 2.0 box. The HD is an SATA one. It is recognized right away by the system bios upon powering up the PC. But I tend to think my board (or PC in general?) has some minor problems in handling chains of USB devices. For example, when I plugged in another external USB disk (this time it is a 2.5" on-the-go type), somehow, the OS X box is not the first HD to start even though I am sure it was set in the bios. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/8167-sata-on-nvidia-nforce4-no-hope-at-all/#findComment-51576 Share on other sites More sharing options...
subramanyam Posted August 21, 2006 Share Posted August 21, 2006 bump... Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/8167-sata-on-nvidia-nforce4-no-hope-at-all/#findComment-171161 Share on other sites More sharing options...
ooZberg Posted August 21, 2006 Share Posted August 21, 2006 Simply buy: http://www.cwol.com/serial-ata/sata-ii-raid-card-pcie.htm (Or some other card with SiL3132) There are real retail drivers, http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=24254 Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/8167-sata-on-nvidia-nforce4-no-hope-at-all/#findComment-171382 Share on other sites More sharing options...
jape Posted August 31, 2006 Share Posted August 31, 2006 Tried to compare the sources with FreeBSD and Linux drivers. Being no developer at all, I failed miserably. I found no real commons between any sources I found. But, it seems like the Nvidia SATA controller is not that different from the "standard" ATA one. The FreeBSD drivers use the same files with only some code lines dedicted to SATA. Maybe that's a point where to start. As ignorant as it may be, I tried to add the SATA device ID's into the source files, as i was done with NF3 and NF4 chipsets and recompiled the .kext wit XCode. Of course (?) it didn't work as the kernel stalled during boot. Anyway, the ATA and SATA drivers don't seem too different and maybe someone with more experience could make it work some day. In the FreeBSD drivers ATA and SATA even share the same name (CK804..) with different device ID's. Didn't saw this thread. You did exactly what I did, however, you forgot to force native mode. Both Linux & VIAATA do this, so I did too. (Look at the thread on my sig for more information & patch). However, it fails EXACTLY like the VIA ATA trick, so I decided the problem must be in IOATAController, Darwin's ATA core functionality. As you said, ATA & SATA are equally handled in both Linux 2.4 ( 2.6 using libata for SATA, 2.6 recent versions using libata for PATA too) ) & FreeBSD. Since the AppleOnBoardPCATA driver handles nForce PATA nicely, but it fails with nForce SATA.... well, that's why I said it must be something on IOATAController. I'm suspecting of a wrong timeout... but I've no proof. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/8167-sata-on-nvidia-nforce4-no-hope-at-all/#findComment-178518 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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