Thread: Marvell 88SX7042 4 Port SATA II support (Digitus 30104 PCI-E card)

Hi all,

I' trying to get my Digitus 30104 4-Port SATA II PCI-E card running under Lion 10.7.2

First of all, here's some info on the card:
http://www.digitus.info/en/products/access...-port-ds-30104/

It uses a Marvell 88SX7042 chip. There is no OSX support.

The card appears to be identical to these cards according to specs and images:

• Rosewill RC-218
  Rosewill.com - Networking, HDD Controllers, SATA 3G HDD Controller, RC-218
• Startech PEXSATA24E
  http://eu.startech.com/Cards-Adapters/HDD-...PCIe~PEXSATA24E

I found two drivers for OSX that come with cards that use the same chip:

• sonnet tempo sata e4i
  Sonnet - Tempo E4i: 4-Port Serial ATA PCI Express Card; Compatible In Power Mac G5 & Windows Desktop Computers With PCI Express Slots
  This card looks very similar (but misses the 2 eSATA ports and the jumpers to activate them). Furthermore, some review on Newegg mentions, that a Rosewill RC-218 (see above) is detected in Windows 7 as this card.
• HighPoint RocketRaid
  HighPoint Technologies, Inc -Mac Support
  They have some cards of the 23xx series, which use a 88SX7042 and have native support in Lion (HighPointRR.kext). However, none of them looks similar.

I followed this guide on kext editing:
http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.ph...t_Patching_List

I figured out the PNPID is 0x704211AB

First attempt: Modifying HighPointRR.kext
See attachment for resulting kext.
With the PNPID, the card is detected.
Unfortunately, connected SATA hard drives are not detected.
I didn't find any errors in the system log files.

Second attempt: Modifying SonnetSATA.kext
I extracted the SonnetSATA.kext from the driver packet that came from the official website.
http://www.sonnettech.com/support/kb/kb.ph...amp;action=b384
Apart from injecting the PNPID, I removed the secondary device match stuff from the info.plist.
See attachment for resulting kext.
This version detects the card and connected hard drives.
The log says:

Code:

kernel: SonnetSATA::init 2.2.6, © 2004-2010 Sonnet Technologies, Inc.
kernel: SonnetSATA::detectDeviceType@0: Marvell 88SX7042 detected Disk Drive ST2000DL003-9VT166 CC32 6YD0GV3L

However, the problem is that the drives appear as "not initialized".
(I tested with a drive GUID and a single HFS+ partition with data and a drive with GUID and a single NTFS partition, which worked fine under Windows 7)
When I use DiskUtil, to initialize and partition the drive (GUID and single HFS+ partition), it gets stuck at "waiting for volumes to be displayed" (or similar - it's a rough translation from the German UI)
No errors are reported.
I also verified that the card is working fine under Windows 7 with the current driver provided by SonnetTech.
So where's the problem in Lion? I also tried earlier driver version (2.2.1 is the 1st that supports Lion) but all with the same result.

At this point I a stuck. I got the feeling, I am really close. It's probably only some minor tweak of the settings - but I have no idea where and what to change.

Any suggestions are welcome. Perhaps some of you owns one of these cards and could try him/herself.

cheers,
xiv

P.S. Attachments did't work. You can download the files here: Dropbox - kext - Simplify your life

According to this post:
Warning: Sonnet Tempo Pro Expresscard to esata does not work in 10.7.2 - MacRumors Forums
the problem could actually be the combination of the driver with 10.7.2.

"It uses a Marvell 88SX7042 chip. There is no OSX support."

Maybe try the Angelbird Wings drivers for OS X. Angelbird
The Angelbird uses this chip too... Mac, Win and Linux bootable...

hello everyone,

Is the problem fix now?