Restored Time Machine Image Won't Boot

[Air]

I've been running a smooth vanilla installation of SL on my Dell Latitude D630 and wanted to test Time Machine before actually using it to restore, so I backed everything up and restored the image onto an external USB. Everything restored fine, except when I boot, I get stuck on "still waiting for root device" after a few kexts load.

Some more helpful specifics:
- On my Leopard installation, also vanilla, I could restore to external USBs and they would boot fine, and when I fresh installed onto my external with SL, it also boot fine, so i'm pretty sure it's not an external-hd issue
- I've read some help threads about restored TM booting problems like this, but it looks like most people just get a blinking cursor, which means they didn't set the OS partition to active. I've done this by reinstalling PC EFI v9 AND using terminal to do fdisk - e /dev/rdisk[disk number] and f [partition number], so I can get into my bootloader fine.
- most important note: I'm using a GUID partition scheme with the hidden efi partition now, whereas with leopard I used MBR. I'm thinking this is the key to my problem.

Who else uses GUID with their hackintoshes, and how did Time Machine work out for you? Can anyone educate me a bit on how GUID and TM work with each other, and how this affects PC's differently from Macs?

Thanks so much in advance!

 

 

 

*EDIT: I believe the issue was that I was using the Leopard install disk to restore an SL image....gotta use the same installer to restore images of that OS.

[min3z]

Somebody can correct me if I'm wrong but this should be easy to answer:

 

1. There is the UUID. The ID of your USB drive is different to your hard drive

2. When you boot from SATA/IDE other kexts are loaded as if you're trying to boot from USB

 

I had the same problem but in the other direction. I installed to a thumbdrive and then tried to clone it to my harddrive with no luck.

 

But I had good results by restoring from timemachine to the original location. I only had to reinstall EFI/Chameleon after restore and everything was fine.

I suggest to give it a try on a different internal HDD (on Dell laptops you can swap harddrives very easily). You can change the UUID by booting into single user mode, mounting the harddrive ("mount -uw /") and edit the plist using VI or nano.

 

greets

min3z

[Air]

ah thanks for the info min3z! i actually used disk utility to clone my internal hd image onto my usb, and it booted fine, so i'm guessing it's just something to do with snow leopard and time machine not playing well on PC's. i think my workaround works well though, because now i can boot quickly from the usb as a recovery environment instead of having to wait for a distro cd to boot up. now i just use time machine to backup files instead of the whole OS.