random kernel panics take 2 and boot question

[xCainex]

Hey guys.

 

I've been around for a while but only got around to installing 10.4.8 a while ago and left it alone for the most part because of this issue. I've scoured the forums, fixed the 10.4.8 not booting issue, managed to beg my way past the USB mouse+PS2 keyboard weirdness but this latest is kind of a killjoy and after forgetting about it for a while it's making me finally break my silence again. My system hardware is as follows:

 

CPU: P4 3.0C (Northwood non-SSE3 core IIRC)

MB: Gigabyte GA-8IK1100 Rev 2.0 (i875p chipset)

Memory: 1 GB Kingston PC3200 Dual Channel DDR

Video: ATi Radeon 9800 Pro 128 MB

Hard drives: two WD1600JD 160GB 7200RPM SATA HDs and one 500GB USB 2.0 WD MyBook External drive

Optical storage: Plextor PX-116A DVD-ROM and Samsung SH-182D DVD-RW drive

Other stuff: Leadtek TV2000XP RM TV Tuner, Belkin 802.11g wireless card

Mouse: USB Logitech MX400

Keyboard: PS2

Monitor: Viewsonic E90f CRT

 

My first HD holds the Vista system partition, and my second HD holds OSX86 and an extended storage partition for Vista. OSX is installed off a vanilla JaS 10.4.8 CD with the PPF patch. When I set my second hard drive as the first bootable drive OSX86 starts booting and everything looks good. That's about as far as it goes though. After getting past the boot loader random kernel panics kill OSX at really random times. About 60-70% of the time i get a panic before I even get into OSX, and the rest of the times I get a panic 10 seconds to a minute after OSX starts up proper and I can actually do stuff in it. Now from what I've read around here and my own experience, the crashing probably has to do with the USB devices, or more likely, the video card. What I want to know, besides a fix for it is if there's any band-aid type fix that can at least curtail the crashing so I can work in something other than single-user command line mode to apply the major fixes?

 

Also, would the chain0 method work for booting OSX off the second HD(which has a proper MBR and everything) using the Vista bootloader? If not can the Vista bootloader just boot the second HD without needing any extraneous stuff?