Stuck on OSX boot screen

[bobbylx]

Hello all, long time lurker first time poster here.

 

So, I've got a question for you. I've got the uphuck 10.4.9 v1.4a install DVD and loaded it on a 40gb IDE drive on my system. The system already has Win Vista Ultimate on a seperate SATA drive. First I've got a problem with the boot loader, chain0 doesn't seem to work for me, but that's a seperate issue.

 

My problem is that when I boot to the OSX drive I get stuck on the apple boot screen. When my system boots up, I have to hit F8. At the boot: line I type rd=disk0s2 and that is how I have to boot into OSX. At this point, like I said, I get stuck on the white screen with the apple and a spinning circle thingy. If I boot with rd=disk0s2 -v, then I can see that it starts loading a lot of stuff, I see no error messages but it gets to a point where it pauses. Then I start seeing the message "waiting on boot device". It will just keep repeating that message until I reboot the system, it will not go any further. I have no problems at all booting back into Vista.

 

I've used gparted and set the boot flag on that disk, and tried a few other tweaks, but nothing seems to help it. Does anyone have any advice on this? Also, after doing some reading, is there any advantage or is it any better to install OSX on vmware? Can I set it up to boot directly to the VMware image?

Here are my system specs.

 

AMD Athlon X2 64

DFI infinity mobo

2gb ram

Nvidia 7800gtx

 

Disk0= 40gb IDE with OSX86

Disk1= 100gb SATA with Vista Ultimate

Disk2= 80gb SATA storage

Disk3= 80gb SATA storage

[bobbylx]

Upon further research, I may have found something to help out. I've read there can be problems with the IDE channels being used. A recommendation I found was to put both my IDE hard drive and the IDE DVD drive on the same cable, and make sure the IDE hdd is set to master. Right now I have the HDD and DVD connected to 2 physically different IDE channels. I'll update if this fixes it.

[bobbylx]

Just an update for anyone experiencing similar problems. I have done some more tweaking and found a couple of things. First, switching the IDE order did not help. Eventually I was able to boot into OSX. What I finally had to do was detach all of my SATA drives first. I noticed that the boot was hanging up on SATA related items. Next, once the SATA drives are removed, I had to boot into safe mode using rd=disk0s2 -x -v. If I didn't boot into safe mode, I would get panic messages, but safe mode booted right up. So now I am loading OSX into VMWare and am going to try to find all the drivers I need then reinstall as a dual boot with hopefully the correct drivers for my system.

[MiJKa]

The last 10.4.x I installed was 10.4.8, but setting the partition active and boot-flagged then blessing both the activation and the flagging always worked for me. But I did it via terminal off the installation DVD.

 

I suppose that it's slightly possible there's differentiation in the flagging done by gparted and the OSX version of the fdisk utility... (There are guides to setting the partition to active and making it bootable, with or without efi in the forum and wiki. A quick search ought to turn them up.)

 

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For the record, I have installed 10.4.8 to both sata and ide hdds while other sata drives were present. In at least one instance, on the same drive as an MS OS. So theoretically, the process is sound, barring some insane hardware incompatibility from the depths of the black lagoon...

[bobbylx]

Well, decided to ditch that version. Am currently running 10.5.1 Leopard for AMD. Got it working perfectly, now I just need to decide what I want to use for a boot loader. Right now I'm just going into BIOS boot menu and choosing either Win hard drive or OSX hard drive.