Hi, as above a good way of keeping a live installation set for 10.6 is to install leopard iATKOSv7 plus qoopz v1.6 (voodoo 9.8.0) kernel is a great way to start. dedicate a full HDD to OS X.

make sure bios is set to AHCI, when you first format your HDD try to use GPT not MBR if possible. make 4 partitions using disk utility in iATKOS disc. 1 is snow approx 40-80GB or more. 2 is leopard (iATKOS) again same size 3 is restore image of retail Mac OS X 10.6 (Build 10A432). 10 GB or so will do and 4 is spare or iATKOS on HDD or Time Machine if any thing goes wrong call the snow partition Macintosh HD. thats what i call it and Leo or Leopard for iATKOS this really help to deal with initial issue when installing snow for the first time

iATKOS will give you chameleon v2 rc2 this can be easily updated.
once you use leopard to setup a bootloader. you can restore retail 10.6 image to a partition. HERE you can create /Extra and add boot plist kext etc

the best way to solve this common problem is to use a kext which can inject your sata controller if not natively atleast universally. ATIATA.kext is a modded AppleVIAATA kext that does the injection allow you to avoid waiting for root device message. see http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/lof...p/t130895.html

then replace mach_kernel manually by downloading http://www.nawcom.com/osx86/files/10...acy_kernel.bz2 rename this to mach_kernel or edit apple.boot.com.plist in /Extra in the retail image (Mac OS X Install DVD). add fakesmc.kext to /Extra in retail image partition.

either way you will have to edit or modify install DVD or setup files on External HDD/USB to include this kext. have a look at Empire EFI it loads necessary kexts for snow retail install to boot up properly

please pm me for specific details I will post a guide soon.

Regards,
Ash