Snow Leopard wont boot without retail disc?

[Lazar Blazer]

Snow Leopard won't boot without a retail disc. This is somewhat strange.

 

Im using Chameleon to boot my OS's and when i try to boot to Snow Leopard it gives me a serial-ATAPI errors and then the waitng for root device.

 

It only works if I insert the retail installation disc and then select the Snow Leopard partition from chameleon.

 

Is there an easy fix hopefully?

 

Help is always greatly appreciated.

[Gringo Vermelho]

I don't understand, it sounds like you're saying that you have a retail DVD with Chameleon on it? That's a contradiction in terms.

 

If you mean you're using a boot CD to boot the retail DVD what you're saying still doesn't make sense, why do the swap trick if you're going to boot from hard drive?

 

If you have Chameleon installed to your hard drive, then it doesn't make sense that inserting a Snow Leopard retail DVD would allow it to boot - Chameleon cannot even see your optical drive when it is installed to HDD.

 

Try inserting any random DVD, even a movie, and see if you get the same result. Try unplugging the DVD drive completely and see if it will boot then.

 

What controller is the DVD drive connected to? The same as your harddrive? What's the make and model and ATA/SATA/AHCI kexts are you using?

[rebecca!]

Might be a BIOS issue. Are your SATA drives set to AHCI?

[Lazar Blazer]

It is a laptop by the way, forgot to mention that and as a laptop you don't get many options like a tower. The only important options in the bios is to change the boot order. The HDD's are connected SATA based and I think the DVD drive is SERIALATAPI based if i know my terminology. Chameleon is installed to one of the two HDD's. The problem has gotten weirder now. The booting issue with the snow leopard disc is solved now. (I forgot that chameleon was booting of the CD drive, silly mistake.) But now it's booting from the HDD. I can't boot into snow leoaprd without it saying SERIALATAPI reconfiguration error.