I’ve been working hard at making my hackintosh “perfect”. This seems to be yet another breakthrough that hadn’t been possible before…I don’t know why, it’s such an easy hack.

Basically, when using your SATA controller in RAID mode, both Leopard and Snow Leopard will refuse to boot with “waiting for root device” (as the device is inaccessible).

This means you can now use Hardware RAID…well for Windows/Linux at least. I am unsure if you can use a RAID volume and install Snow Leopard to it, however, you should be able to use Snow Leopard on a single drive and still keep your Windows RAID intact. Basically it means one less BIOS change each time you want to jump into OSX and that you’ll be able to access files on your Windows/Linux RAID volumes without rebooting. If you really want OSX RAID, I don’t see anything stopping you from using Apple’s Software RAID while your SATA controller is in RAID mode.

So, how to? This isn’t the most Vanilla way, I’m sure there’s a better way of doing this…but I’ll come up with that later.

Simply open up /System/Library/Extensions/AppleAHCIPort.kext/Contents/ and edit the Info.plist

Under the ICH10AHCI key, you can either:

a) Replace IOPCIPrimaryMatch or

b) Duplicate the whole key/dict and rename it ICH10RAID and then change the IOPCIPrimaryMatch

Either way, you need to add 0×28228086 to IOPCIPrimaryMatch

It will look something like (after you’ve made the changes):

<key>ICH10AHCI</key>
<dict>
<key>CFBundleIdentifier</key>
<string>com.apple.driver.AppleAHCIPort</string>
<key>Chipset Name</key>
<string>ICH10 AHCI</string>
<key>IOClass</key>
<string>AppleAHCI</string>
<key>IOPCIPrimaryMatch</key>
<string>0x3a228086 0×28228086</string>
<key>IOProbeScore</key>
<integer>2000</integer>
<key>IOProviderClass</key>
<string>IOPCIDevice</string>
<key>Vendor Name</key>
<string>Intel</string>
</dict>

Save it, Run Kext Utility, or whatever you use to repair permissions.

Now, on my machine Chameleon RC1 with PC_EFI 10.2 refused to boot. I kept getting boot1: error. For this to work you need to install Chameleon RC1/PC_EFI 10.2 to a USB drive then use the USB drive to boot your Snow Leopard partition. I’m unsure, but perhaps the next version of Chameleon, PC_EFI or BootThink may not have this error, lets hope! :)

When I did this, Snow Leopard booted….BUT…I kept getting Console error messages to do with AppleUSBEHCI and this seemed to disable the use of my keyboard and mouse clicks. So if anyone knows how to fix that, please post here.

Please test this. Honestly, I don’t know if you create a RAID Volume that maybe OSX will not detect the RAID and simply show two drives. I haven’t had time to fully test this yet. What I can confirm is that OSX boots SUCCESSFULLY in SATA-RAID mode with ICH10R.

Oh, I did this on a Gigabyte GA-EP45-EXTREME.