Same board, nothing changed now Niresh USB won't boot

[The Shaun]

I'm at my wits end with this build and I don't know where else to turn, so I'm coming here.

 

I built this machine back in July, all the details (the Z97 one) are in my signature.  Literally nothing changed.

 

One day I went to boot, and FakeSMC failed to initialize, so it wasn't able to persist.   No problem, I'll just whip out the Yosemite USB stick I built with Niresh's MacPwn.  No luck, won't boot.  Okay, weird.  I redownloaded Yosemite and MacPwn on my other Hack and re-write the USB.  Now no matter what, I'm getting a Waiting for Root Device error.

 

I haven't seen that since the Tiger days, and I don't have any setting that seems to be wrong...

 

VT-d disabled, SATA=ACHI, Tried with Legacy USB on and off, no difference.  I don't get it, that exact same USB installer booted this rig just fine back in November when I installed Yosemite, and now I've got nothing. Tried disconnecting all the drives in my machine except for the SSD that I had OS X on, nothing.  I absolutely cannot get it to boot any flavor of OS X.  Won't even work with an old Mavericks MyHack USB, either.

 

Am I overlooking some really obvious BIOS setting that got bumped?  I went ahead and did a CMOS reset to wipe out any potential accidental changes I made, but still no luck. 

 

So, to recap:

 

Niresh MacPwn USB = Still waiting for root device.

Existing OS X install = FakeSMC fails to initialize.