boot issue AMD Athlon

[spinnerator]

After putzing around for a few weeks I final managed to get my AMD Athlon 64 to run Snow Leopard 10.6.4. using #############. It runs very well once booted. However I have two issues and they may actually be the same issue. If, I set the Snow HD to be the first boot device, I get the dreaded 'cannot find root device' error. It only seems to boot if I use another drive as first boot and the F8 boot option function to get to the HD I've got Snow installed on. The second issue, is if I try to set the Snow HD as first boot and get the error, when I reboot, and use the F8 function I get the error also. I have to go into my Leopard install and rerun ###### and then reboot using F8. The HD that I installed Snow on, is the only SATA drive in my system, the rest are PATA. I'm guessing the issue is the SATA kext but I don't understand why it gets installed under ###### and then seems to disappear when I change the boot sequence.