Still waiting for root device - I've tried everything!

[soritong]

I've tried EVERYTHING to get Snow Leopard working on my PC. At one point I had it booting, but it got a bit messed up so I had to reinstall. I've used every single flag that is available and multiple distros and I'm still stuck. I've even tried going from my SATA HDD to a PATA HDD with no luck.

 

Every time I'm still saddled with the "still waiting for root device" message upon boot. The installation goes perfectly fine. Below are my stats:

 

EVGA nVidia 750i SLI MOBO (nForce 4 chipset)

Intel Core 2 Duo

4GB RAM

GeForce 8800 GTS

160GB SATA HDD

80GB PATA HDD

IDE DVD ROM

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[MaLd0n]

You'll see "Still waiting for root device" when OS X can't talk to your drive controller, either because you haven't installed the right driver for it, because your PATA drives are jumpered/cabled wrong, your drives are attached to an unsupported controller (then you're out of luck), or SATA is not set to AHCI mode in the BIOS.

 

 

Most modern motherboards have a secondary SATA controller from JMicron, Silicon Image or Marvell.

 

The SATA ports of the secondary controller are normally colored differently (white or orange) than those of the primary controller (usually red). Check your motherboard manual to see which ports belong to which controller.

 

There are drivers for OS X for the most common secondary controllers, but the main controller (Intel ICHx or Nvidia nForce) is usually the more compatible since Apple use Intel ICHx and nForce as well.

 

If you have problems with drives not being recognized, either plug them into a port on the main drive controller, or find and install drivers for the "off-chipset" drive controller.

 

For PATA (IDE) drives, try a different jumper setting and/or cable position, and make sure you're using 80 conductor cables. If you have two IDE ports, put each device at the end of it's own cable and jumper it as master device.

There's very limited support for PATA drives in OS X (IIRC no modern Macs have PATA devices?) so you'll probably need a community provided driver to get your PATA drives running. Again Intel and Nvidia are the easiest to get working.

 

The Chameleon bootloader official download includes some injector or "legacy" kexts for many common PATA and SATA controllers.

 

If your board has a Marvell 6xxx controller, you need AppleVIAATA or SuperVIAATA.kext. There are also nForceATA and ATIATA kexts out there. Older Intel boards with ICH5 might need a patched AppleIntelPIIATA.kext.

 

Intel ICHx or nForce SATA controllers in AHCI mode (set in the BIOS) are the most compatible and easiest to get working.

 

gringo vermelho