dr.vox Posted June 10, 2009 Share Posted June 10, 2009 Ok quick background to start off with: had OS X back in September until about April or May when I installed Win7, after which Paragon Partition Manager cocked up my Mac's boot manager. I wasn't too bothered as Win7 is great and saw myself sticking with it. Now I'm getting bored of Win7 and would like the choice. Kalyway 10.5.2 is what I used before, and updated using wmarsh's methods (in the E520 thread) to get up to 10.5.6. Kalyway 10.5.2 installs and boots fine now, whereas iDeneb 1.4 (10.5.6) and iPC 10.5.6 both install fine but draw up the old Still waiting for root device. I've tried mixing and matching kexts from Kalyway to both but with no success. I just tried updating to 10.5.3 on Kalyway using the method I used before and both times it has failed - must be something I'm doing wrong or differently, but I can't see what, so I now want to be able to run iDeneb or iPC even more. So just throwing this out there in the hope I'll get a solution, but I'm not too optimistic as it's a really obscure problem. So which kexts are related to the Still waiting for root device error? I assume it's solely those related to the chipset. Weird thing is, both iDeneb and iPC have Intel ICHx kexts which claim to work for all ICH7/8/9 systems (I have an ICH8R mobo), and an alternative Intel chipset driver too, but neither work. So anyone got any ideas or similar experiences, anything at all to help? EDIT: Specs: Mobo: Dell 0WG864 Chipset: Intel Broadwater G965 CPU: Dual Core Pentium D 915 (Presler) GPU: nVidia XFX 9600GT (G94GT) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dr.vox Posted June 11, 2009 Author Share Posted June 11, 2009 I don't get this. iAtkos 10.5.5 brings up Still waiting for root device too! Can someone please just tell me which kexts are related to this error and I can try replacing them with kalyway's. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gazepo Posted June 11, 2009 Share Posted June 11, 2009 Post your hardware details. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dr.vox Posted June 11, 2009 Author Share Posted June 11, 2009 Sorry, edited the first post earlier, must've been around the same time oyu posted. Mobo: Dell 0WG864 Chipset: Intel Broadwater G965 CPU: Dual Core Pentium D 915 (Presler) GPU: nVidia XFX 9600GT (G94GT) Just ask for anything else. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gazepo Posted June 11, 2009 Share Posted June 11, 2009 So to be clear the "still waiting for...." error comes after a successful installation right? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dr.vox Posted June 11, 2009 Author Share Posted June 11, 2009 Bugger, sorry for the prolonged reply. Yeah, always successful installs. Like I said, I had iDeneb actually running once or twice, fully working, at the desktop, using Safari, Finder, etc., full 9600GT support... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gazepo Posted June 11, 2009 Share Posted June 11, 2009 When you have "still waiting for..." after install means you got the wrong chipset. Did you use in customize the ICHx chipset? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dr.vox Posted June 11, 2009 Author Share Posted June 11, 2009 Yes, like I said, I used the proper chipset kexts which said they should work for ICH8. iDeneb and iPC also had alternative Intel kexts, and I tried those too. Weird tihng is Kalyway doesn't even have specific Intel kexts. And as I said like twice, iDeneb WAS WORKING but then a reboot resulted in the root error and would never boot again. iPC and iAtkos didn't boot at all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gazepo Posted June 11, 2009 Share Posted June 11, 2009 Does the system boot in safe mode? All these you are saying are really weird!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dr.vox Posted June 11, 2009 Author Share Posted June 11, 2009 Nope, safe mode also results in Still waiting for root device. Obviously, it's where, in Kalyway, 'Jettisoning kernel link' comes up. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dr.vox Posted June 12, 2009 Author Share Posted June 12, 2009 Oh come on, someone must know which kexts are related or have some kind of idea how to help. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gazepo Posted June 12, 2009 Share Posted June 12, 2009 I think the hole mess is on the partitionig. Did you try with a fresh re-partition? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dr.vox Posted June 12, 2009 Author Share Posted June 12, 2009 Yeah, I have - formatted the whole drive because OS X doesn't like resizing partitions on MBR, so I went over it all. Kalyway works on both first and second partitions, from what i remember. EDIT: Found a BIOS update on Dell's website which is stupidly hidden unless you specifically search for it. Doubt it'll help but it's worth a bash. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dr.vox Posted June 12, 2009 Author Share Posted June 12, 2009 Formatted the whole drive, one partition, MBR; iDeneb this time, Still waiting for root device. Booted Kalyway disc, cp -pr (all *ATA*.kext from Kalyway disc to iDeneb install). Still waiting for root device. Booting iPC disc now, to try install iPC's chipset drivers. Will edit soon. Not hopeful, again. Edit: iPC Intel ICHx (7/8/9) SATA kext - Still waiting for root device. iPC Legacy ICHx kext - Still waiting for root device. What a surprise. I'm fresh out of ideas except for using Kalyway's kexts, but I don't know what they are. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wolfs Posted June 12, 2009 Share Posted June 12, 2009 I had similar problems when installing my Hackintosh, I found that sometimes I would randomly get "Still waiting for root device" randomly without any reason, I found that connecting a PATA HD (If you have one) to the IDE0 Master, and Having the DVD Drive on the slave, with as many SATA drives placed anywhere as you want works, but only sometimes, In the event that it doesn't work keep the configuration listed above, but change the boot priority of the Hard Drives and boot the drive manually from the boot selector menu in Bios (Mine was hidden - You press F8 while the BIOS is booting) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dr.vox Posted June 12, 2009 Author Share Posted June 12, 2009 I don't have any IDE connectors - my chipset and mobo don't support IDE at all. And I always choose my boot drive when booting to OS X, as it's installed on a seperate HD to my Windows disk, which is first in the boot queue. (However, I installed Kalyway and it works on the same disk as the one I'm trying all these distros on, so I know this disk is capable of running OS X). It can't just be random errors after so many boots and installs, though it is strange that iDeneb did work for one or two boots but then stopped with no alteration to any chipset kexts. Thanks anyway, wolfs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dr.vox Posted June 12, 2009 Author Share Posted June 12, 2009 Here, thedude9 says he has iPC working perfectly after installing on his E520 (same machine as mine). EDIT: Installed iPC again to the same drive, repartitioned with two partitions, GUID partition table this time, Still waiting for root device. EDIT2: Installed to a different hard drive this time; installed faster, but still getting root error. EDIT3: Saturday, 13:44, managed to install iDeneb successfully on a different hard drive (the one mentioned above, much faster install again) and it's actually working. Typing from it now. Can only hope it'll work after a reboot though — have to hope it doesn't bring up root like it did last time. Still there after a reboot. Fingers crossed this is it. Having a bit of trouble with NTFS at the minute, but I think that might be NTFS-3G and MacFuses' fault. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
orocimaru Posted September 25, 2009 Share Posted September 25, 2009 flash your bios and install again Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ridolph Posted February 12, 2010 Share Posted February 12, 2010 I just upgraded my Shuttle S35V2 from 10.5.6 to 10.5.8 using iPc for the original install and the iDeneb combo upgrade. iPc worked fine for 10.5.6, sweet machine. Got the dreaded still waiting for root device error after the upgrade. So I restored all of the old extensions and it then booted into 10.5.8. So my question is, which kext is likely to be the cause? I diffed the two versions and there are changes all over the place. Something is breaking the driver so it can't see the boot volume. Is that JMicronATA? Since there are presumably valuable things in all of the 10.5.8 updates, I don't want everything to be stuck at 10.5.6 kexts. Which are the likely suspects, and I'll try to swap them out one at a time. Thanks Ok quick background to start off with: had OS X back in September until about April or May when I installed Win7, after which Paragon Partition Manager cocked up my Mac's boot manager. I wasn't too bothered as Win7 is great and saw myself sticking with it. Now I'm getting bored of Win7 and would like the choice. Kalyway 10.5.2 is what I used before, and updated using wmarsh's methods (in the E520 thread) to get up to 10.5.6. Kalyway 10.5.2 installs and boots fine now, whereas iDeneb 1.4 (10.5.6) and iPC 10.5.6 both install fine but draw up the old Still waiting for root device. I've tried mixing and matching kexts from Kalyway to both but with no success. I just tried updating to 10.5.3 on Kalyway using the method I used before and both times it has failed - must be something I'm doing wrong or differently, but I can't see what, so I now want to be able to run iDeneb or iPC even more. So just throwing this out there in the hope I'll get a solution, but I'm not too optimistic as it's a really obscure problem. So which kexts are related to the Still waiting for root device error? I assume it's solely those related to the chipset. Weird thing is, both iDeneb and iPC have Intel ICHx kexts which claim to work for all ICH7/8/9 systems (I have an ICH8R mobo), and an alternative Intel chipset driver too, but neither work. So anyone got any ideas or similar experiences, anything at all to help? EDIT: Specs: Mobo: Dell 0WG864 Chipset: Intel Broadwater G965 CPU: Dual Core Pentium D 915 (Presler) GPU: nVidia XFX 9600GT (G94GT) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dr.vox Posted February 12, 2010 Author Share Posted February 12, 2010 Sorry, this was ages ago (and I'm pretty sure it was an unrelated issue to yours) so I can't help, but maybe someone else can. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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