High Sierra (14.0.01) doesn't recognize internal SATA drives until I update the firmware on GA-Z77-DS3H

[xefned]

So, this will sound batty, and your first impressions should be that "this guy is losing his mind," but hear me out...

I have an old workhorse Gigabyte GA-Z77-DS3H that has had numerous OS successes from Snow Leopard, El Capitan, Mavericks, etc.

My High Sierra thumb drive would boot but could not see any drives. I put the machine in storage for several months, until January when I had to work from home (pre-Corona.) After booting from the USB drive, I would only see my USB drive as a possible drive to install to and of course, that was locked and not a viable option anyway.

I tried everything to get my two internal SSDs to show up:

1. Reformatted with MBR (in an external enclosure on a different machine, of course.)
2. Reformatted with GUID and Mac OS Extended Journaled
3. Reformatted with GUID and APFS
4. Quadruple-checked all my BIOS settings.
5. Tried different SATA and power cables.
6. Tried to format from Disk Utility in the High Sierra installer (No visible discs.)
7. Tried terminal from the High Sierra installer (diskutil - list) <-- this command would show the boot USB thumbdrive and 20 virtual partitions. (Where in the world are these coming from? I repartitioned both drives.)

Finally, I found a post where someone suggested upgrading the mobo firmware to clear out all those unwanted UEFI boot images.

Only 2 newer firmware were available and they're both betas but I'm desperate so I try it. So I upgrade the firmware to a beta firmware (F10f). I change the BIOS settings to optimized defaults and set the drive type from IDE to SATA. Voilá!! My drive is visible, I install High Sierra, and I'm blissfully happy for 3 months.

Last week I had a power outage, which appears to have corrupted my boot drive. I'm only getting the null set symbol when I boot.

I go through all 7 of the above steps multiple times. I'm losing my mind because I've been doing it all weekend.

Last-ditch attempt, I Q-Flash my BIOS to the last remaining BIOS for this motherboard: F11a.
It worked. I'm typing this from High Sierra.

But what do I do next time I have a drive failure? I'm out of firmware revisions to use?

If you've read this far, thank you. I'd love to hear your thoughts, Matthew

 

[Jamesbond007]

So, this will sound batty, and your first impressions should be that "this guy is losing his mind," but hear me out...

I have an old workhorse Gigabyte GA-Z77-DS3H that has had numerous OS successes from Snow Leopard, El Capitan, Mavericks, etc.

My High Sierra thumb drive would boot but could not see any drives. I put the machine in storage for several months, until January when I had to work from home (pre-Corona.) After booting from the USB drive, I would only see my USB drive as a possible drive to install to and of course, that was locked and not a viable option anyway.

I tried everything to get my two internal SSDs to show up:

1. Reformatted with MBR (in an external enclosure on a different machine, of course.)
2. Reformatted with GUID and Mac OS Extended Journaled
3. Reformatted with GUID and APFS
4. Quadruple-checked all my BIOS settings.
5. Tried different SATA and power cables.
6. Tried to format from Disk Utility in the High Sierra installer (No visible discs.)
7. Tried terminal from the High Sierra installer (diskutil - list) <-- this command would show the boot USB thumbdrive and 20 virtual partitions. (Where in the world are these coming from? I repartitioned both drives.)

Finally, I found a post where someone suggested upgrading the mobo firmware to clear out all those unwanted UEFI boot images.

Only 2 newer firmware were available and they're both betas but I'm desperate so I try it. So I upgrade the firmware to a beta firmware (F10f). I change the BIOS settings to optimized defaults and set the drive type from IDE to SATA. Voilá!! My drive is visible, I install High Sierra, and I'm blissfully happy for 3 months.

Last week I had a power outage, which appears to have corrupted my boot drive. I'm only getting the null set symbol when I boot.

I go through all 7 of the above steps multiple times. I'm losing my mind because I've been doing it all weekend.

Last-ditch attempt, I Q-Flash my BIOS to the last remaining BIOS for this motherboard: F11a.
It worked. I'm typing this from High Sierra.

But what do I do next time I have a drive failure? I'm out of firmware revisions to use?

If you've read this far, thank you. I'd love to hear your thoughts, Matthew

If your objective is to "clear out all those unwanted UEFI boot images" by installing a new BIOS, you can use the same version (or even a lower version) of BIOS installed on the motherboard. So the next time you feel you need to do this, just reinstall the F9 BIOS using Q-Flash if you want.

 

[xefned]

Bond, I'm so glad you mentioned that. It never occurred to me that I can go backwards to a previous firmware. That's a great idea; they've all worked great.

My goal isn't actually to clear unwanted UEFI boot images. It's just to be able to see my internal drives when I install High Sierra in the future. That appears to be a weird side effect of upgrading my firmware.

I found this interesting post about patching my USB installer. It might actually solve my problem in the future. I might give it a go. Worst case scenario, I'll break my USB installer and have to create a new one.

[Solved] Drives not showing up in installer "Disk I/O error"

Hi, im having a similar problem. The USB installer I created with UniBeast shows my my hard-drive in the Disk Utility as uninitialized. If I try to erase it then I get the can't write to the last byte error. I would like to add/install the AppleAHCIPort.kext onto my USB installer but I haven't...

www.tonymacx86.com

Thanks for responding. Matthew