Part 2: Where’d my IO go?

Shortly after upgrading my Hackintosh to 10.5.6 it occured to me that the machine was NOTABLY slower. Digging into it a little bit more I discovered it was all IO wait issues (read: poor disk performance). We’re talking like 5 minute boots and fun stuff like that.

I opened up System Profiler, and to my surprise there were no longer any SATA devices (T43 is a SATA based machine, at least mine is). The hard drive was now nested in the ATA section with the DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive. At this point I suspected driver schnanigans so I then dumped dmesg to a text file and put it on a usb keychain for some comparisons.

Once again I imaged the machine and then restored the old 10.5.3 image and compared dmesg. The old 10.5.3 (which FLEW compared to my 10.5.6 image) was using AppleIntelPIIXATA.kext and the 10.5.6 image had switched to AppleVIAATA.kext. As I said in part 1, I had to select VIA-SB to even get OSX to install on this machine… so I guess this makes sense. I haven’t had time to boot the install DVD again to see if PIIXATA is an option to choose.

ANYWAY, I found this thread on InsanelyMac which includes the PIIXATA drivers for various OSX builds: AppleIntelPIIXATA kext fully working for all ICHx Mobo (All Sata Channels working), Fully working kext (Leopard & Tiger version 1.1)

I don’t think English is his first language, so let me try to clarify:

• Use OSX86Tools to install the AppleIntelPIIXATA.kext, don’t close the app yet.
• Open terminal and change directory to: /System/Library/Extensions
• mv AppleVIAATA.kext /var/tmp (in case you need it back!).
• Back in OSX86Tools check Set Extensions permissions & Clear Extensions Cache and then Run Selected Items.
• Reboot machine, and you should notice GREATLY improved performance.

If it doesn’t boot again, well don’t blame me 🙂

Till next time…