Installation of Kalyway's 10.5.2

[Sprppo]

Well, friends, here is my first post.

 

I tried to install Kalyway's distro in the following trashcan:

 

Intel DG35U

Quad 6600

4 GB Kingston DDR800

DVDRW SATA

HDD 320 SATA

nVidia 8500

 

I installed perfectly well in a Leopard GUID partition. It took 18 minutes.

But Startup Disk would not see my HDD, even when Disk Utilities did.

It did not work at first, but it did after several kernel tries, and driver choices.

Here's the damage report:

 

1- the thing would not see my video card

Solution: used the Natit option in the installer. Got an unknown piece of {censored}, but Quartz Accelerated, so I am happy.

I want to insist here: I installed the OS many many times, without problems other than the lack of HW video acceleration.

2- The thing would not see my network card.

Solution: none- I know there is a way. I've seen it around, and lost it somehow.

 

3- the thing would not boot into Leopard unless the DVD is in the drive.

Solution: none. Again, there is a solution over there, or several. here's what I did:

a) booted -s, and then stated

fdisk -e /dev/rdisk0

flag 1

update

w

quit

- no effect-

installed WinXP in the other partition.

Copied a file called Chain0 in the root of the disk, and edited the boot.ini file to include the chain0 command in the operative systems list. It gave me the opportunity to boot using the XP bootloader instead of the Darwin (which would not load unless the root was the DVD) This way, XP booted fine, but OSX gave me the "HFS+ partition error".

I've read somewhere that the partition should be MBR and not GUID, so I wanted it to give it a shot.

I tried to reinstall OSX with the DVD for the Nth time, and got:

 

4- Still waiting for root device.

Solution: none, dammit.

So far I tried:

- switch the SATA ports of the drives.

- Replace the HDD

- Replace the SATA

- Take out the battery, and unplug the memories for 2 hours.

- mess with the BIOS

- Take the SATA, put it into another computer, erase all partitions, create a one solid NTFS partition, erase it twice, and leave the drive barenaked as a newborn child.

- Use another installer

- I prayed. Silently, at first, and then way aloud, with tears and all.

 

So, here's the thing. I need help with all these problems. I hope I explained it properly, as english is not my natural language (if I wrote something odd or stupid, think of the closest reasonable word I would have wrote) but I really need help, as I need to end a project in Final Cut Studio, and I am not purchasing a Mac under any circumstance.

 

Thank you all, hopefully, the few things I worked out fine will help others.