Cannot get SATA working - Vista - Snow Leopard - 2009 Unibody Mac Pro

[fishyuk]

Hi all,

I need to use Vista (rather than Win 7) as my Windows installation to be compatible with my company VPN.

I've done a clean install of Vista SP1 and then performed all the updates. Despite Vista being AHCI/SATA aware the drives (both my X25-M G2 and the SATA optical drive) are showing as ATA devices.

I've since tried installing the nvidia SATA driver from boot camp 3 and got a blue screen on reboot. I then tried the MS AHCI driver included with Vista and it rebooted fine, said the controller was SATA but the drives were still ATA.

I repeated the process having edited the Registry so that the msahci start key was 0 and still had the same results.

Almost as if SL/EFI is presenting the disks as ATA (despite them showing in SATA on OSX). Is there any way to make EFI present the disks as SATA? I've plenty of PCs running as SATA and the only analogous situation I've seen is when the BIOS is set to ATA and not AHCI. As soon as you set AHCI in a PC you get the SATA drives (unless the msahci or drivers aren't set and then you can't boot).

Cheers

Alex

PS - I meant Macbook Pro!

 

[Infrared]

Hi all,

I need to use Vista (rather than Win 7) as my Windows installation to be compatible with my company VPN.

I've done a clean install of Vista SP1 and then performed all the updates. Despite Vista being AHCI/SATA aware the drives (both my X25-M G2 and the SATA optical drive) are showing as ATA devices.

I've since tried installing the nvidia SATA driver from boot camp 3 and got a blue screen on reboot. I then tried the MS AHCI driver included with Vista and it rebooted fine, said the controller was SATA but the drives were still ATA.

I repeated the process having edited the Registry so that the msahci start key was 0 and still had the same results.

Almost as if SL/EFI is presenting the disks as ATA (despite them showing in SATA on OSX). Is there any way to make EFI present the disks as SATA? I've plenty of PCs running as SATA and the only analogous situation I've seen is when the BIOS is set to ATA and not AHCI. As soon as you set AHCI in a PC you get the SATA drives (unless the msahci or drivers aren't set and then you can't boot).

Cheers

Alex

Do you mean "Macbook Pro"? There isn't a unibody Mac Pro.

The problem is caused by Apple's firmware BIOS emulation not enabling
AHCI mode by default. And there is no BIOS menu to enable it. So you
are stuck with the default.

For some Mac Pros the problem has been solved like so:

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=126089

 

[fishyuk]

Do you mean "Macbook Pro"? There isn't a unibody Mac Pro.

The problem is caused by Apple's firmware BIOS emulation not enabling
AHCI mode by default. And there is no BIOS menu to enable it. So you
are stuck with the default.

For some Mac Pros the problem has been solved like so:

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=126089

Ah, apologies. I did indeed mean the macbook Pro. I'll study your link some more though it does seem more focused on the 2008 Mac Pros with Intel chipsets (appreciated nontheless). Weird defaulting to ATA, even with Boot Camp supplying SATA.

 

[Infrared]

Ah, apologies. I did indeed mean the macbook Pro. I'll study your link some more though it does seem more focused on the 2008 Mac Pros with Intel chipsets (appreciated nontheless). Weird defaulting to ATA, even with Boot Camp supplying SATA.

I believe the author of the MBR fix is looking into a fix for NVIDIA chipsets.

I have a new unibody MBP and I'm working on a solution for enabling AHCI

Definitely worth keeping an eye on developments over there.