Snow Leopard won't recognize internal hard drive

[HomicidalSpoon]

Hi, a few months ago i installed Snow Leopard off a retail disc using Empire Efi onto my external simpletech hard drive, it's 120gb; i made the install for my gateway Nv53 laptop with amd dual core. I have an old Gateway ML3109 laptop that no one uses and i am trying to install Snow Leopard retail using empire efi; after i swap discs and hit F5 it goes through the process to start the install, but after a minute or so, it simply stops and says "waiting for root device" and it brings that up multiple times. I know from experience that this means the hard drive, but i am not sure what it means. So i figure i still have my external hard drive with Snow leopard installed on it, so i boot into SL from my external and it loads fine, so i figure i will just copy the install over to the internal hard drive. But i go into Disk Utility and it only shows my external hard drive and its partitions, not my internal hard drive. I have searched on these forums and quite a few others and googled my problem but i can not find a fix, from what i have found on the SATA/IDE part of these forums i am missing the drivers for my hard drive? is this correct? i have googled this but i am not sure exactly what i am looking for. Thanks for the help. I know the hard drive is not bad because over the last few weeks i have installed Windows XP, Vista and & onto this hard drive and it booted just fine.

 

Here are the specs of the computer i am trying to install SL onto:

Gateway ML3109

Intel Celeron Processor @1.7GHz

1Gb of ram

ATI Radeon 200M graphics (i believe)

4006148R motherboard

 

If you need to know more specs please let me know.

 

Thanks for the help.

[Gringo Vermelho]

Not the hard drive, the hard drive controller.

 

You need to find out what make and model the Southbridge part of the chipset in your laptop is and then add the drivers for it to your Empire boot CD or your Snow Leopard installation.

 

You can use LSPCI in Snow Leopard to find the information you need. If you need help, post the output of lscpi -nn here.

[HomicidalSpoon]

This is what LSPCI gave me:

 

00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc Unknown device 5a31 (rev 01)

 

00:01.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS480 PCI Bridge

 

00:04.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS480 PCI Bridge

 

00:05.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS480 PCI Bridge

 

00:13.0 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 USB Host Controller (rev 80)

 

00:13.1 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 USB Host Controller (rev 80)

 

00:13.2 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 USB2 Host Controller (rev 80)

 

00:14.0 SMBus: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 SMBus Controller (rev 83)

 

00:14.1 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 IDE Controller (rev 80)

 

00:14.2 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB4x0 High Definition Audio Controller (rev 01)

 

00:14.3 ISA bridge: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 PCI-ISA Bridge (rev 80)

 

00:14.4 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 PCI-PCI Bridge (rev 80)

 

01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RC410 [Radeon Xpress 200M]

 

02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8038 PCI-E Fast Ethernet Controller (rev 14)

 

08:09.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8185 IEEE 802.11a/b/g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 20)

[Gringo Vermelho]

There it is:

00:14.1 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 IDE Controller (rev 80)

 

Try google/forum search with something like SB400 IDE Snow Leopard or ATI ATA as search keywords and see what you can come up with.

 

There's an ATIATA.kext out there but I don't know if that works with Snow Leopard or the SB400, I've never attempted to install OS X on anything with ATI chipset.

 

Good luck.

[rooskie54]

I have the same controller as you, the RS480/SB400. Unfortunately my work around was to use a USB drive. I've only had this desktop for 2 weeks (friend was throwing it away), but heres been my install results so far:

XP: Worked

7: Couldn't find the hard drive. I didn't try looking for drivers though.

Leopard: Installed (iAtkos 7), but took forever to boot and ran very slow. The installer said the drive was 120 GB when it was actually ~200GB.

Snow Leopard: Saw the full size of the drive but would crash when installing.

 

With my install on USB the internal drive will show up in the Finder, but eventually I get a message that it has been removed incorrectly. Trying to access it yields the same message and occasionally a kernel panic. Some of this could have to do with it being a faulty hard drive; I haven't had it long enough to know but it certainly worked with XP.

 

I'd love to know if you find a way to get this working, good luck.

[HomicidalSpoon]

There it is:

 

 

Try google/forum search with something like SB400 IDE Snow Leopard or ATI ATA as search keywords and see what you can come up with.

 

There's an ATIATA.kext out there but I don't know if that works with Snow Leopard or the SB400, I've never attempted to install OS X on anything with ATI chipset.

 

Good luck.

 

You are the best dude!!! Thank you!!! I googled ATI ATA and found this website: http://osx86.net/f36/ati-ata-driver-optimi...-leopard-t4441/ downloaded the kext and installed it with kext helper 0.7 and my internal hard drive now shows up and my dvd drive does as well. Thank you so much!!!!!!

 

To Rooskie: Go to this website: http://osx86.net/f36/ati-ata-driver-optimi...-leopard-t4441/ and download the file that is linked there, then install it via install helper 0.7 (<-------great program) and then reboot and everything should show up ( if you are having the same problem as me).

 

 

Hey Gringo Vermelho, could you ppoint me in the right direction about installing this onto a flash drive that already has the SL install disc restored onto so i can install a fresh copy of 10.6? thanks.

 

Thank you again for all your help!!!!!

[Gringo Vermelho]

If you're using Chameleon with an /extra/extensions folder on your flash drive, just stick Andy's driver in there, like he says in the thread you linked to.