no PATA or SATA for iPC on nForce 630i MoBo

[elimgar]

Short version:

It seems clear that I do not have the correct kext or kernel or driver for either PATA or SATA for my nForce 630i MoBo. I have a drive that boots OSx86 when connected via USB, but only gives “Still waiting for Root device” when connected via PATA.

Longer version:

All of my hardware works perfectly when I was previously using Fedora Linux.
I was unable to boot the iPC 10.5.6 final DVD from the SATA optical drive in my PC due to the “Still waiting for Root device” error.
I removed the PATA HD from that PC, and connected it to my Apple laptop with a PATA to USB converter kit.
I was able to successfully install 10.5.6 on the drive.
When I plug that HD into my PC using the USB converter kit, it boots! It works (almost) perfectly (I have no sound, but that is a problem for another day).
When I plug that same HD into the same PC using its native IDE/PATA cable, I only get the dreaded “Still waiting for Root device” problem.
When I boot from the HD as a USB drive, it does not see the SATA optical drive.
Apparently, the AppleNForce ATA driver that I installed from the iPC disk is not working.

I have spent days reading everything I can find on Google about iPC and my nForce chipset. It seems that the version of iPC OSx86 that I have is the best option. But clearly I’m missing something. Does anybody have a working install of iPC on a 630i MoBo? Does anybody have any ideas of other chipset drivers to try? Thanks in advance for any help. The details are below.

Here is what I installed:
iPC OSx86 10.5.6 Base System
iPC OSx86 10.5.6 Intel AMD SSE2 SSE3
kernel: 9.5.0 Voodoo Kernel
chipset driver: AppleNForce ATA nForce Drivers
USB driver: Patched USB Drivers
Fixes & Patches: Seatbelt.kext 10.5.5
Apple SMBIOS Patch: AppleSMBIOS-27 Rev 3 Mac Pro
Applications: All but Marvin’s AMD Utility


Here are some things that I tried:

I have tried every possible setting of IDE vs RAID vs AHCI in the BIOS. All are the same. It can boot from the drive when it is USB, but it can’t boot from the same drive when it is PATA.

I have tried any number of flags and options in the Chameleon boot loader, including –v –f cpus=1 maxmem=3072. No help there.

I have tried using different IDE cables to connect the HD as either a slave or master and using jumpers to activate cable select or not. No effect.

I have tried including or removing the SATA optical drive and a SATA hard drive and all the permutations of the BIOS, but still no effect.


Here is my setup:

1. MOBO: Gigabyte GA-73PVM-S2H

2. Chipset: nForce 630i

3. CPU: Intel Celeron 430 (1.8 GHz) single core (not OCd)

4. BIOS: I started out following Verdant’s Pre_Series7_nForce_Chipset_BIOS_SettingsV2.pdf
I have also tried every possible combination of IDE vs RAID vs AHCI settings for the HDDs.

5. DVDRW: 1ea DVD-RW SATA drive

6. HDD: 1ea 180 GB PATA/IDE Seagate HD. Not a RAID. (Although I tried that setting in the BIOS just for the hell of it).

7. HD PARTITION/FORMATTING: This hard drive can be used completely for OSx86. Currently I have it partitioned into 3x 10 GB HFS+ partitions (with journaling) and 1x 20 GB FAT32 partition using a MBR.

8. Current OS's installed: I have a completely working installation of Fedora Linux 10 on a different (SATA) HD that I can add in or not as the needed. Ultimately, I plan to dual boot, but that is a problem for later. Right now, I just want to get OSx86 working on the dedicated PATA HD.

9. Your graphics card(s): 1- On board nVidia GeForce 7100 with 256 MB of shared memory.
2-PCI-E16 nVidia GeForce 6200LE with 256 MB of dedicated memory

10. PCI/PCI-E cards: 1-The above mentioned PCI-E graphics card
2-1xHauppauge PVR-150 MPEG2 capture card

11. Onboard devices/functions: 1-Audio chipset: Realtek ALC889A
2-LAN chipset: Realtek RTL 8211B
3-Firewire: 1 on back panel
4-USB 2.0: 4 on back panel
5-eSATA: 1 3Gb/s on back panel

12. OSx86 Install DVD(s):
iPC OSx86 10.5.6 Universal 10.5.6 PPF5 Final Release
patched with V1.1 PPF (nForce) and unpatched