The old 'waiting for root device' chestnut...

[the.salamander]

Hello everyone,

 

Right, I've scoured the internet trying to find out how to sort this one out, but it seems i'm in a slightly different position to most:

 

Basically I had Kalyway 10.5.3 (updated from 5.2) running sweet. Had battled my way through all the standard errors thanks to the good people on this board and others.

 

I then managed to get XP pro installed on another harddrive and have the two of them running quite happily, oblivious of each other, and selectable via BIOS boot order.

 

Then I got greedy... I thought I must be able to load OSX from the windows boot loader using the chain0 file. Kept on getting the 'chain booting error'. So I thought it might be due to my XP drive being in NTFS format. So I converted it to FAT32 using Partition Magic in Windows.

 

And I think that may have {censored}ed things somewhat. Not sure how, but after a while I returned to boot OS X and ...

 

My OS X will now not boot, just hangs with the 'waiting for root device' message burning a hole through my life. Now, what puzzles me is that apparently this error message indicates driver issues - right? But I haven't touched any of the drivers on the OS X drive and the hardware has remained identical throughout. Possibly an MBR problem, perhaps? So I tried XP's System restore to take me back to before my partitioning. Nada.

 

So... after more internet/forum scouring I tried all the boot options (Darwin loader still says hello, at least) but nothing's helped. I even used transmac to remove the extensions.mkext as I read that had helped in one situation... I am now totally stumped. Thought I'd just reinstall to the partition, but Disk Utility in the installer doesn't see them (although I can still see them via transmac).

 

And the biggest {censored}ter of all is that I'd happily copied the contents of all my old hard drives on to partitions on my shiny new 1TB OSX one... and gave away my old hard drives. So I don't now even have the {censored} space to take everything off and try a total reinstall. And I don't have the cash to get another 1TB right now. Also have some quite important work to get done (for which I need OSX) by next week...

 

If anyone has any suggestions or can recommend a good euthanasia clinic I'd be most grateful.

 

Specs as below...

 

P5QL PRO (with 0803 bios tweak by juzzi) - running in AHCI mode (for XP and OSX).

Quad Core 6600 (normal clocking)

4GB OCZ RAM (800mhz)

Samsung 1tb SATA(with OSX and 2 other partitions containing my life and livelihood)

Samsung 40GB SATA (with XP on it)

Nvidia Geforce 8400 GS

Belkin Firewire card (Texas Instruments chip)

Belkin F5D7050uk USB wireless

US Robotics Wireless Lan card (for use in windows)

Samsung SATA DVD Drive

 

All of the above was the same before, during and after the reign of OSX on my puter.

 

All jokes aside - please help a fellow out. I was just getting into OS X.

 

Cheers.