@photoseb,
You are correct. I didn't install Mavericks onto the Wintec card. Instead, I replaced the internal hard disc with a Crucial SSD some months ago while running 10.8, and so upgraded to 10.9 as normal. I use the Wintec card for additional storage - actually my iTunes library. Actually, given Apple's ropey (at best) support for ExpressCard SSDs on 10.9, I don't think it's a good idea to trust to booting 10.9 from a Wintec card. (10.8 & earlier should be fine...but you might have some grief choosing the boot disc when running 10.9.) Of course it should work if you're willing to live on the edge! I wouldn't be surprised if future OS X 10.9 updates try to put back the 10.9 driver...and we don't know if/when Apple will fix it, so this may be more trouble than it's worth.
In order to do it, you're going to have a fairly hard time, because when the 10.9 installer puts the broken IOPCIFamily.kext onto the system, you're going to interrupt the installation process to boot up from somwehere else so that you can put the 10.8 IOPCIFamily.kext back in its place. You'll need root access to the Wintec disc that you're installing 10.9 on, and I expect FileVault will get in the way too if you're using it. When logged in with root access to the Wintec disc, make sure that the ownership is set to root:wheel and that the permissions are 755 otherwise the OS X kernel won't load it - that's what Kext Wizard does for you when it copies the file.)
Good luck if you try this!
Something else for the group: I recently filled up the Wintec SSD card (by accident) and OS X 10.9 did not handle it well. It trashed the file system (mismatching free block count), made it unmountable, and I had to reformat it and recover it from Time Machine backup. Nice work Apple. After recovery, it worked fine again.
Along the way, the system log showed lots of "TRIM ignored" messages...because I had not enabled TRIM on the Wintec SSD card even though it supports it. I have since used the 3rd party TRIM enabler to enable it on both the Wintec card and my Crucial SSD. Your mileage may vary, but enabling TRIM might have become something you really want to do in 10.9, where as it was more optional on 10.8. This could also have been a consequence of using the 10.8 IOPCIFamily.kext, but I rather doubt it as that driver should just expose devices to the operating system. The real I/O is performed by the SATA kernel extension, sending messages through IOPCIFamily.kext when talking to the Wintec card. But I'm just speculating here and I have not filled up the Wintec disc again since enabling TRIM.
Regards,
Chris
