miramar's Zomac - Zotac Z77ITX - i5 3570K - HD4000 - Mini-ITX - Mountain Lion

[miramar]

Does the eSata port work with external drives? I tried sending a PM, but they don't seem to send or appear in the sent messages.

Thanks

(Researching for my build, so no parts to list in my signature)

I'm not sure as I haven't got around to using them as eSATA. I will try sometime soon, I've got a couple of eSata docks hooked up to another hackintosh. Anyway in the Z77ITX's BIOS you can specify whether a SATA port is eSata. So I guess you can probably hook up an eSata bracket to one or more of the ports and then specify those ports as eSata in the BIOS.

 

[miramar]

I have H77ITX-A-E which also come with Atheros AR9285 wifi chip. I use DSDT to make it work, it connect to my wireless-n network. However, max speed is always 65M. Machine is very close to router, and signal is pretty consistent. What do you see if you are using same card?

Thanks

Noodle

Hi Noodle,

It's a limitation of OS X. It'll only connect at max 65mbit when running at 2.4GHz and will only attempt to connect at 130mbit at 5Ghz freqs. It's the same with my Macbook Pro. I tested it with an Airport Extreme. I think if you boot up in Windows on your hack, it should have no probs connecting at 130mb.

 

[miramar]

Hi miramar
I'd like to share the my status on USB3.0. Based on my result
1 USB3.0 is works well with my USB 3.0 storage segate one. I got the x3 times speed than USB 2.0 via blackmagicdisk
Don't know why as I didn't do anything for USB (Dedicated Kext/Multibeast or via DSDT...). I just hope that this might helps to you/your 3.0 device utilization as we have a same board. thank you.

Thanks, I have the same observations as you. USB3 externals HDs and flash drives are really fast.

 

[miramar]

Nice build, that I discover now that you have your new one with GA-B75M-D3V.
I like the case. Looks really nice. (similar to the Silverstone mini-ITX that I first wanted to build. But it did not have these hot swappable SATA drives.)

I really like this case. Very practical. The hot swappable bays are very handy and the case is cheap too but well constructed. The steel panels are fairly thick. It's not exactly a designer's case but there are neat touches like the power and HD LEDs which are behind the optical drive door which is clear black plastic so they only show when lit.

 

[miramar]

Yesterday I replaced the OCZ Vertex 2 120Gb SSD with a Sandisk Extreme 240GB. The process was fairly quick and easy. I had cloned my Vertex 2 to an image file with CCC a few days ago in anticipation of the upgrade.

1. Plugged in the new Sandisk
2. Restored the image file with CCC
3. Reboot with Unibeast USB
4. Install Chimera

I had forgotten to clone the recovery partition which I had created to get "Find My Mac" working. To my surprise, "Find My Mac" still worked when I rebooted. So I guess you don't actually need the recovery partition. All you need is the nvram script.

If you're using the Sandisk Extreme, they have just released a new firmware which fixes the "non-functioning TRIM" problem.

 

[miramar]

Miramar, he means the edit to have the AHCI device identified properly in system profiler instead of "Unknown".
...

Thanks, minihack. I still have a lot to learn about DSDT editing.

 

[miramar]

More than a week ago, I updated from 10.8.1 to 10.8.2 but I forgot to document the process here. So just to be complete, here it is.

1. Update performed using the OSXUpdCombo10.8.2.dmg downloaded from Apple
2. Backup AppleACPIPlatform.kext and AppleHDA.kext
3. Install update
4. Restore AppleACPIPlatform.kext and AppleHDA.kext

I also replaced the ram with a couple of Kingston 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 sticks. Geekbench increased by a little.

 

[minihack]

Hi Miramar,
Just wanted to mention there is no need to back up the platform kext. The problem was that FakeSMC.kext had a plugin (or sometimes it was an extra kext inside SLE) that was called OEMSmbios.kext - this last kext is the one that caused the platform kext of 10.8.2 to panic. The better solution is to trash the OEMSmbios.kext........once that is done 10.8.2 does not panic and also (I guess) if you left the other kext in place it will cause all future updates to panic too. Note that the new FakeSMC.kext in Multibeast does NOT any longer include the OEMSmbios.kext.
Thought I should mention this as (as you can see) doing a roll back for the platform kext is not the best solution and will only solve the problem until the next system update time.

 

[miramar]

Hi Miramar,
Just wanted to mention there is no need to back up the platform kext. The problem was that FakeSMC.kext had a plugin (or sometimes it was an extra kext inside SLE) that was called OEMSmbios.kext - this last kext is the one that caused the platform kext of 10.8.2 to panic. The better solution is to trash the OEMSmbios.kext........once that is done 10.8.2 does not panic and also (I guess) if you left the other kext in place it will cause all future updates to panic too. Note that the new FakeSMC.kext in Multibeast does NOT any longer include the OEMSmbios.kext.
Thought I should mention this as (as you can see) doing a roll back for the platform kext is not the best solution and will only solve the problem until the next system update time.

Hi minihack, thanks. I'm aware of oemsmbios.kext. In fact when I did the update, I tried both methods, removing oemsmbios.kext and putting it back & rolling back AppleACPIPlatform.kext, and both worked. I did the rollback last and just left it at that.

Update:
Installed the updated FakeSMC from Multibeast 5.1.2 and restored vanilla AppleACPIPlatform.kext from 10.8.2.

 

[miramar]

Just flashed the firmware of the Sandisk Extreme 240GB SSD from r201 to r211. I did this using the ISO image downloaded from Sandisk which was burnt onto a CDR and booted from a SATA DVD drive connected using a SATA-USB3 adaptor cable. I tried but was unsuccessful in creating a bootable flash drive from the ISO. Tried Disk Utility, dd and unetbootin.

Updated to Toleda's Mountain Lion AppleHDA using layout-id:3. New DSDT coming up.