Alright, so I have been trying my best to follow this, and I've noticed this on my own machine. My very first installation attempt installed OS X onto my 8GB flash drive. It was not until after that installation that the Mac OS installer was able to recognize my machine's internal HDD. With the flash drive plugged into the machine at boot up, the gray Apple loading screen pops up after the Darwin prompt like it normally does, but without the flash drive, it reverts to the typical black screen with tons of text going through it (like a verbose option).

My question is, does the USB flash drive help the computer to boot up? And is there a way to make this "boot up drive" available as a partition on the actually computer HDD so you won't need the USB to boot? As stupid as it sounds, I've seen youtube videos of people simply pressing their power button and bam, the computer just boots up like a normal Apple would. lol I'm just trying to get my computer to a point where it will do this!