Inconsistency with booting [Noob]

[JLMac]

Ok, seeing as to how much of a noob I am when it comes to low-level OS work (especially UNIX-based ones), such as kernel patching and such, (I'm much more of a hardware and networking buff). And I am SSSOOOO sick of M$ Win-blows and have been arranging to shift my whole workspace to Mac. In doing so, I decided to run Mac OS X on my current PC (sort of like a testing environment), so I can atleast get used to it ($$ is an issue).

 

So I'm gonna just come out and ask this question, cause I've done more than a worthy amount of trial and error.

 

First thing's first, my rig:

Processor: Pentium D 2.8GHz (820 Model)

Motherboard: Intel D945GNT (Latest BIOS rev. 4119)

Memory: 2GB DDR2-667 (2x1GB DIMM, Dual Channel [Kingston])

Graphics: eVGA nVidia 7600GT 256MB (PCI Express x16)

Chipset: I believe it's ICH7

Audio: On-board Sigmatel 9220 (5.1 Surround Sound)

Network: Linksys LNE-100TX (Don't mind buying another, in case this doesn't work)

 

Now, I honestly feel like I'm missing something trivial considering what is happening with me, so here we go.

 

- Downloaded iPC 10.5.6 PPF5 FINAL

- Burnt ISO to DVD+R disc at 2.4x (slowest possible)

- Verified data on disc

- Only plugged DVD-ROM and SATAII Hard Disk (80GB Maxtor)

- I boot up the PC using the burnt DVD

- Chameleon bootloader 1.0.11 starts up with no problem

- I press F8 and enter the -f flag

- I reach the installation screen (this is where choices come in)

 

- First off, I open the Disk Utility and create a partition (HFS, Journaled, Case-sensitive) on my hard disk (it says that it's MBR not GUID).

- As far as I know, this should do it, and so I should go on with the installation.

- Installation continues until I get the choice to "Customize" before installing and this is where I'm guessing the S#!% hits the fan.

 

 

I tried so many combinations at first, but then I did some reading and decided to only worry about getting the proper Kernel and Chipset setup, then I can worry about the rest later. But no matter what I do (so far), I always get the same result. The installation goes through and it tells me that it was succesful and so I restart the PC. Once I restart, I take out the DVD, cause I want to make sure that I'm booting off of the hard disk (or at least giving it a chance to). You probably know where this is going now, I get the 'insert boot device and press any key' message.

 

Now I'm sure that I'm missing something absolutely trivial, or something that's been mentioned earlier, but I must have managed to miss it and it's making me go nuts... I'm also very sick of reinstalling the OS for the 10th time, just to get no change.

 

Can somebody please shed some light on the matter, I would be more than grateful.

[JLMac]

Ok, so after doing some reading, I believe that I might be getting somewhere, if anyone can confirm this for me that would be great.

 

So when I use the disk utility, I am just creating one big partition on the whole disk (the name of the partition is disk0s1). So I'm guessing that I would have to use fdisk through the terminal to actual turn the disk into a bootable one. In that case disk0s1 would be a boot partition and disk0s2 would be the OS partition. Is this right in any way or am I just talking absolute {censored} right now?

 

I'm mainly asking because I tried this at some point earlier (during one of my numerous trials), but when I tried to boot I got the following:

 

boot0: MBR
boot0: done
boot1: error

 

Didn't pick any kexts at the time, just installed the base system.

 

On another note, would installing Chameleon (even though I have no idea how to do so) help in any way?