Can't boot without safe mode

[Timelord]

Hi everyone! I've spent the better part of the last week getting Mac OS X up and running on my computer in a way that's convenient for me, and I've finally met with success. However the road I took to get here is a convoluted one. Let me walk you through it before I get to my problem.

 

My computer (AMD Athlon 3500+) has two 250 GB SATA hard drives. One of them contains a 250 GB NTFS Windows XP Professional SP2 partition, and the other contained (up until recently) a 247 GB ext3 Ubuntu Linux partition and a 3 GB swap partition. Then, to my amazement, I discover the path to OSX86. I find the prospect of this very cool -- all I have is a first revision iMac (rev. A) that does nothing anymore because it's too old. I've been aching for a chance to really sink my teeth into OS X and this seems to be the perfect way to do it.

 

So I grab the prepatched 10.4.4 install DVD with 10.4.5 update and attempt to install it. One big problem -- it doesn't see my SATA hard drives. Annoying, but not too critical. I grab a 40 GB IDE hard drive and pop it in. The OS X installer sees it just fine, and I install it (10.4.5) to the drive. Once up and running, I start to tinker. I love it so far, and even better, everything seems to be working great! But the fact that it needs its own IDE drive is somewhat annoying.

 

So I figure, maybe I can use the dd command from Linux to put this new working Mac OS X install on my SATA drive. What do I have to lose, right? If it fails, I can always fall back to the working IDE drive. So I create a 42 GB (just to be safe) NTFS partition on the Linux SATA drive, change its partition type to AF, and dd the drive over. Then I set up an appropriate entry in my GRUB bootloader, disconnect the IDE drive, and away I go. My plan went perfectly, too. Mac OS X boots like it should, I can still run everything, and the whole thing comes together without a hitch. I'm understandably overjoyed (I'm dumbing this story down considerably -- many more failed attempts ensued before this success).

 

Now to my current problem. Now that a couple days have gone by, I see things haven't exactly worked the way I want them to. Whenever I boot Mac OS X, it presents me with the Darwin/x86 boot loader. If I boot Mac OS X normally with no boot arguments, then I get about half a second worth of "Loading HFS+ file" lines (only about 10 of them), then the much smaller text comes up and it seems to begin the actual OS loading process. However it stops after a few lines and delays for a really long time before it tells me "Still waiting for root device." Several seconds go by and then it says it again. And again. And so on and so forth. When I restart the computer and try it again, this time using the "-x" boot argument to enter safe mode, it boots normally. This time, however, I notice that I get hundreds and hundreds of "Loading HFS+ file" lines that takes about 30 seconds, as opposed to the half a second and 10 lines that I got from booting it normally. After that, the OS proceeds to boot normally, and everything inside the OS still works like a charm. However now I need sound, which doesn't work in safe mode. (The strange part is that I know for a fact I have been able to boot OS X normally with working sound and everything as it is set up now, on the SATA drive, with no changes to the hardware configuration.) To me, this sounds like it can't see the hard drive, but I know it should be able to and it certainly can from safe mode. Because of this, I come to you all seeking guidance. Can anyone share some insight as to possible ways of getting my OS X to boot normally again?

 

Thanks so much for any assistance!