OSDev.org

I recently started developing my own bootloader and kernel for educational purposes.

I started out booting from a floppy disk using , and then from a hard drive using

I then started working on an ahci driver for reading / writing from sata hhds.

The problem is when starting qemu using these args (taken from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48351096/how-to-emulate-a-sata-disk-drive-in-qemu)


the bios doesn't seem to find the hard drive, it outputs-


starting qemu with does show the ahci drive, but when I select it it just prints the same output from above.

I tried using qemu 4.1.50 on both linux and windows and 2.8.1 on linux, exact same result in all versions.

A workaround I found (for working on the driver) was using

to boot the kernel. (But I do want to boot from the same hard drive that I interact with) I then enumerate the pci bus and find the ahci controller (as part of the driver initialization). But then reading the active ports' sata status results in an ipm of 0 and det of 1 (the device is present but the connection hasn't been initalized) , which according to AHCI the bios should initialize so for now I assume it's the same issue.
Am I doing something wrong here?

(I also posted this question to stack overflow if you happen to encounter it)

After comparing my bootloader to a different os with ahci hhd support and some more research I figured out I was missing a valid partition table from my mbr, so the BIOS didn't consider it bootable.

I don't exactly know why it worked with since it should still be a hard drive with partitions, I'll edit this answer if I figure that out.