p5K vanilla questions (Retail vs. Distro)

[Vibrational Mode]

Hey everyone. I'll be up front about this: I'm a total srub when it comes to all of this stuff, just getting into it, so I may be making a mistake about even asking here. Still, you guys are the most knowledgeable about the topic, so I thought I'd at least risk asking the question. Hopefully I'm not too intolerable because of it! Apologies in advance.

 

I'm thinking about making the jump with an old system of mine: Asus p5k vanilla mobo (0605 BIOS), e6750 CPU, running a 8800 GTS and SATA HDD / DVD Drives. Nothing's on the jMicron, and I leave that disabled in the BIOS. I've got my hands on a retail DVD for 10.5.2, and I thought I might be able to use the 123boot bootloader method to get things installed nice and easy.

 

Surprise, surprise, nothing's easy. I didn't realize that when Asus flashed out the AHCI support in 0605 that it'd break things. Apparently I'm unable to install OS X on the p5K vanilla board because of this. Good ol' 'Waiting for root device' failure.

 

I'm just curious: Are there any options I should explore before giving up? Most google scouring I've done leads me to a topic here that specifically states to steer clear of the p5K vanilla, but I'm wondering if any progress might've been made, specifically in terms of retail installation. Should I be looking into a distro instead of retail? That gets a little tricky for me, unfortunately, but I'm beginning to think it may be the only option.

 

Thanks for any help!