How sort the Internal hard drives

[uran0s]

Hello,

I have done quite a bit of research on the subject, without finding hardly anything talking about the topic, and even less, solutions.

I have several internal drives, from Nvme in PCI-E slot, Nvme M2 on board, 4 drives in sata ports on board and 2 more drives in gsata on board (Marvell chip).

In System Information everything appears correctly, in disk utility it appears random, which doesn't interest me much anymore. What I would like to see in order, is in programs that I use image editing for ex, but the mac os mounts half of randomly, sometimes a simple reboot changes the order of two drives.

In the terminal if you put the command " df " it shows the order they are appearing in the programs. However, and I have tried disconnecting all the drives, connecting one by one according to the order I want and nothing happens, including exchanging some ports with others.

My question is, isn't it possible, as in windows (C, D, E...), to tell the system that I want to mount the drives in x order (disk1, disk2, disk3, disk4...)? Is this possible in a configuration in the OS, or does it have to do with the bootloader?

I use mac os Ventura, opencore 0.8.8, smbios imacpro1.1.

I leave print screen of how the OS mounts the disks.

Regards

 

[Edhawk]

The disk order is nothing to do with the Bootloader. Once control of the system has passed from the bootloader to the OS any and all disk order settings are controlled by the OS. The Bootloader is only really interested in the boot drives EFI Partition and then which drive is being used to boot the OS.

How many disks do you think you would find in a real iMacPro or iMac? The answer would normally be 1. So why would Apple add a feature for ordering disks to a specific layout? When none of their iMac systems need such a feature.

The exception to the above is when the system has a Fusion Drive, which consists of a fast SSD and a spinning HDD. In this case the system has 2 drives, but the system sees it as 1. Again no need to provide a feature to order the layout of the drives.

Issues using on-board M.2 connector.

You may need to look at whether your use of the on-board M.2 slot is interfering with the use of one or more SATA ports. This was quite common on early NVMe motherboards (Haswell). The Z97X-UD5H motherboard's specification page states the following:

The SATA3 4/5 connectors will become unavailable when an M.2 SSD is installed.

This may be part of your problem.

You may be better served moving the M.2 SSD to another PCIe adapter and using all three PCIe x 16 slots. So the 2 x SATA ports 4 & 5 are available for your spinning HDD's.

GA-Z97X-UD5H (rev. 1.0) Specification | Motherboard - GIGABYTE Global

Lasting Quality from GIGABYTE.GIGABYTE Ultra Durable™ motherboards bring together a unique blend of features and technologies that offer users the absolute ...

www.gigabyte.com

Also showing your System disks in the Hackintool - Disks tab might give us a better understanding of how you have your drives installed. Example below from a similar Haswell system (Asus Z97-K).



The Hackintool - Disks window can be stretched vertically and horizontally to show more information if required, before a screenshot is taken for posting here. As shown in the screenshot below.

 

[uran0s]

The disk order is nothing to do with the Bootloader. Once control of the system has passed from the bootloader to the OS any and all disk order settings are controlled by the OS. The Bootloader is only really interested in the boot drives EFI Partition and then which drive is being used to boot the OS.

How many disks do you think you would find in a real iMacPro or iMac? The answer would normally be 1. So why would Apple add a feature for ordering disks to a specific layout? When none of their iMac systems need such a feature.

The exception to the above is when the system has a Fusion Drive, which consists of a fast SSD and a spinning HDD. In this case the system has 2 drives, but the system sees it as 1. Again no need to provide a feature to order the layout of the drives.

Issues using on-board M.2 connector.

You may need to look at whether your use of the on-board M.2 slot is interfering with the use of one or more SATA ports. This was quite common on early NVMe motherboards (Haswell). The Z97X-UD5H motherboard's specification page states the following:

The SATA3 4/5 connectors will become unavailable when an M.2 SSD is installed.

This may be part of your problem.

You may be better served moving the M.2 SSD to another PCIe adapter and using all three PCIe x 16 slots. So the 2 x SATA ports 4 & 5 are available for your spinning HDD's.

GA-Z97X-UD5H (rev. 1.0) Specification | Motherboard - GIGABYTE Global

Lasting Quality from GIGABYTE.GIGABYTE Ultra Durable™ motherboards bring together a unique blend of features and technologies that offer users the absolute ...

www.gigabyte.com

Also showing your System disks in the Hackintool - Disks tab might give us a better understanding of how you have your drives installed. Example below from a similar Haswell system (Asus Z97-K).

View attachment 563849

The Hackintool - Disks window can be stretched vertically and horizontally to show more information if required, before a screenshot is taken for posting here. As shown in the screenshot below.

Hi Edhawk,

Thank you very much for all your explanation.
Yes, indeed this will not be a problem for the original mac's.

The problem is that I can put the disks correctly on the motherboard, and even show the order well in the system information, but in practice, the way it mounts the disks in the OS you can't understand the logic. Because he assigns disk1, disk2, disk3... to the disks, and it doesn't change, but the way he then decides to show it, e.g., disk4, disk16, disk15, disk9... is that it is not understandable.

I leave here printscreen of the hackintosh app.

 

[Edhawk]

What you are looking at in the Hackintool Screenshot is normal for an APFS drive, especially when you have more than one APFS drive with a number of APFS Containers on each drive.

1. The Physical drive will be given a disk number.
2. The APFS Container will be given a disk number
3. Then the APFS volumes/partitions created with the APFS Container will be given another disk number.
4. A second APFS Container would have a different disk number, as would any volumes created in the container.

That is how Apple have configured APFS formatted drives to work.

You can't change the disk numbers for the Containers or synthetic partitions. All you can do is position the physical drives in the order you want to see them in the bios.