You don't have the smoke ring... But does the computer stay on? I have the same issue but the computer goes off... Maybe it's your problem... Anyways, for booting I booted from the CD with the flag rd=disk0s2 (to modify by your installation hard drive). Or if you cannot boot to the CD drive, you could try -v -x. Also, you can modify SATA settings in the bios to AHCI.