When I boot the installer disk I get: Still waiting for root divice.
Tried rd=disk1s1 and 0s1 but they don't work

Boot from a Darwin 8.01 CD, and at the boot menu, eject the disc (it will let you eject normally) and replace with the OS X disc.
You won't need to do the rd= crap, but as soon as it tries to start mach_kernel, you get booted back out to the boot menu. I'm pretty sure this is the same thing that happens when you do the rd= stuff.

doesn't work

im still waiting for root divice....

your gonna have to wait forever

oke i'll try
but now seriously even now the installer disk should boot further than this, shouldn't it? I've got sse3 so that's no problem.

i d/l ed the darwin 8.01 cd but when i try 2 boot from it it keeps restarting.

how does this help me?

It helps you to eat more spam, diceysoft23, don't spam.

I also got the still waiting.. text, and then changed my cables to a more simple layout. (Originally the CDROM was secondary slave.) Now its on primary slave and the booting process goes further.

(Now it does not find suitable drives for installation, but that's a completely different story.)

Oh... and we are talking about the OpenDarwin now...

in addition i get: SAM Multimedia: READ or WRITE failed, ASC = 0x24, ASCQ = 0x00

What does this mean??

try bs=/dev/hda1 and io=0xFFFFFFFF I put that in and lotsa stuff opened up for me