Still waiting for root device... - boot stalls

[Sambal]

Hi

I installed Mac OSX86 using the patched marklar-iso yesterday. The install went very well, apart from the fact that I couldn't get my disk to show up at first (running newfs_hfs /dev/disk0s1 and rebooting worked for me) the part from the DVD went without any trouble.

Then I tried booting it. First it just stopped at the Darwin screen. I then tried booting with the kernel options rd=disk0s1 -v -s -x . This showed me the problem was with AppleUSBTopCase (I think it was named like that), so I moved the extension and the problem stopped. But now I have a problem I can't find a fix for...

After loading all the extensions in verbose (-v) mode the font displayed on the screen changes and you get all kinds of other messages. That seems to go well until FireWire, after which nothing seems to happen. Waiting for some time shows the sentence "Still waiting for root device..." and waiting longer just displays it more often.

When I boot without -v, I get the light grey apple screen for some time, and then a small circular sign with a diagonal line in the middle appears.

Some of the suggested fixes I found googling:

- Move harddrives: it's a laptop, no luck with that.

- Boot with rd=disk0s1: didn't work for me

Has someone else encountered this problem? (The moment I asked on the IRC channel another guy had exactly the same problem, but neither of us could unfortunately be helped).

I would so much love to be able to use Mac OS X on my laptop as well...

Thanks a lot

Sam

[lotus49]

I know this isn't much help, but precisely the same thing happened to me on a Compaq Evo N610c. The installation went fine (except for minor problems seeing the disk in Disk Utility, but repartitioning a couple of time worked).

 

I know the hardware is OK because I re-installed with the tiger-flat image file and everything works very well.

 

Can you transcribe the last few lines from the startup screen (ie enter -v at the boot prompt)? I cannot as I have now reinstalled.

 

Incidentally I used the same DVD to install OSX on my desktop no problem (except that my AMD 64 3500+ runs at about a third of the speed of my much slower laptop - but that's another matter).