Asterra Posted April 27, 2009 Share Posted April 27, 2009 I made sure to buy hardware that is known to have lots of successes and one of the most current guides in these forums (for vanilla OSX): GIGABYTE GA-EX58-UD5 motherboard, CORE i7 920 cpu, G.SKILL 3x2GB DDR3 PC3-12800 ram. Also using SAPPHIRE 4870 gpu, PIONEER DVR-216DBK SATA dvd-rom drive, and a MAXTOR 160GB IDE HDD (4G160J8). I've got iDeneb 1.4 (10.5.6), iPC (10.5.6), XxX (10.5.6). iPC and XxX do the same thing: reboot the pc shortly after booting. iDeneb is able to bring up the gray apple screen but locks up after a bit. Booting with options "-v -x -f" shows what's going on: After an iTunes driver, it begins to "STILL WAITING FOR ROOT DEVICE". Searches on this issue reveal a lot of guesswork. Based on some of the guesswork (example: one person felt sure that the Mac has to have the HDD on Master and the DVD-ROM drive on Slave), I've tried fiddling with the master/slave positions of my two drives. The HDD is stuck on "Channel 5 Master" because it is IDE and the UD5 has designated its lone IDE port to that channel, but I can at least move the DVD-ROM to Slave ("Channel 0 Slave", in this case). Doesn't make a difference, though. As far as the UD5's BIOS goes, I've got cores set to "1", hyperthreading off, Native IDE on. I also once tried turning SATA AHCI on, but all this did was to give me this error before the DVD even booted: "Invalid or Damaged Bootable partition". Considering I'm not currently even trying to use a SATA HDD, I'll avoid that particular unknown until I have to deal with it (and I'm assuming it doesn't matter that my DVD-ROM drive is SATA). I have also tried adding "busratio=20" to the boot string (so, in total, "busratio=20 -v -x -f") as it has been mentioned that the i7 920 requires this for some reason. Again, no change in boot behavior. Some guides mention the need to format the HDD to "HFS+ (Journaled)" with the Disk Utility. Fair enough. When I see something that looks like a Disk Utility, I'll do just that. Meanwhile, because of the haphazard nature of all of the OSX86 guides out there, I'm not sure if I was supposed to have seen Disk Utility already or not, or whether I was supposed to find some means of formatting the HDD to HFS+ before trying to boot an OSX86 install disc. (By comparison, for example, the option to format a drive to NTSF is the first thing one encounters when installing Windows.) My goal is to get to where I can use the UD5 guide, but that guide starts out by saying you need OSX up and running. Easy for it to say. ;p Anyone want to knock out any of the countless unknowns I've mentioned in this post? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Asterra Posted April 27, 2009 Author Share Posted April 27, 2009 In the grand tradition of partially solving one's own issues via desperate and time-wasting random poking around, I have managed to make a little progress. So, for anyone else who hits this particular brick wall (the "STILL WAITING FOR ROOT DEVICE" problem), the answer seems to be: 1: ACHI must be on. 2: SATA device(s) - apparently including a DVD-ROM drive - must be plugged into one of the RAID-capable slots on the motherboard. The reason and indeed accuracy of this observation is suspect, as I don't quite grasp it myself. But I will take it. So now we come to the next installment of my work in progress. I got iDeneb 1.4 installed with the following customizations checked: Chipset: ICHx fixed. Network: ethernet: RealtekR1000. Apps: Kext Helper, OSx86 Tools. Booting the resulting installation results in a rather quick reboot of the pc. Obviously, something fundamental is screwed. Booting with "busratio=20 -x -v -f" produces a great heap of text, and then it reboots. About the only thing I can try now is iPC and XxX, to see if they manage to get me a bit further in the booting process. Assuming they'll work now that I've supposedly cleared the first hurdle. Feel free to chime in with discussion / suggestions. Update: Nope, iPC and XxX still quickly reboot the pc. They were evidently not put together with newer hardware in mind. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Asterra Posted April 27, 2009 Author Share Posted April 27, 2009 Made considerable progress thanks to Kalyway 10.5.2. It booted and installed, and the install booted also. No issues. Compared to the other three releases, it's practically magic. Now all that's left is to get past the inevitable problems with the vanilla OSX installation procedure. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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