OSX Boot--> "Still waiting on root device"

[Hendrick]

Hi everyone-

I have an older computer that I use for testing. It mostly just sits there, because I've lost interest in it. After I purchased my MacBook Pro, I became interested in attempting to install OSX onto my older desktop.

The model is a Compaq SR1620NX. It supports SSE3, at least, as far as I can tell. I added an extra HD (both are IDE), as well as an extra SATA DVD drive. I know it doesn't have a lot of RAM, but if I get OSX onto it, I'll purchase some on Newegg tonight. My ideal goal is to install OSX onto one of the HD's, that would only contain OSX, nothing else.

I've tried three different "distro" combination in order to get this to work. I'm going to try to explain their results the best I can below.


Tiger- This was an old disk I burned before Leopard even came out. I didn't really try much on it the first time, and I've really looked over it, because I really want at least Leopard onto the computer, if not, Snow Leopard. But anyways, this disk boots without any trouble in my IDE DVD drive, recognizes the drives, and installs without any problems. However, it won't boot afterwards. When this occurred, I lost interest, not wanting to go through whole bunch of work for a severely outdated OS.


Leopard 1- This is another disk I downloaded. I've tried almost everything trying to get this to work. Playing with almost any imaginable combination of the Jumper cables on the HD's, trying only having the drive I want OSX on plugged in. I also played around with the combination of the DVD drives. Nothing. Every time it would boot, would receive the error: "Still waiting on root device."

Leopard 2- Very similiar situation to Leopard 1, but with different results. Eventually, I found one combination that would work... booting from the SATA DVD drive, while only having the one IDE drive plugged in. However, when the installer came time to have me choose the location of where I want the OS, none of my drives were listed. Both were also missing from the Disk Utility app on the DVD.


I've nearly given up. I'm afraid I no longer remember which DVD was which, but I know one was iDeneb, while the other was either iPC, or iATKOS.

Any help at all is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[tom-swift]

I had an awful time with the dreaded "Still waiting for root device" and a vanilla Snow Leopard install. The system I was attempting the install (well the 100% vanilla SL fully functional one I'm on now ) on has a single SATA hard disk and an IDE DVD drive. I attempted the install using a BOOT 123 disk and the retail install DVD and tried every possible jumper and BIOS setting to no avail. The solution that finally worked was to install a boot loader (Chameleon in my case) onto a USB flash drive (8 GB+) and then restore the install DVD onto the USB drive as well. I followed instructions from this post. I then completely unplugged the DVD drive, not sure if that's necessary or not (FYI it's the only IDE device in this machine), and booted off the USB drive with the SATA controller set to AHCPI mode and booted the install DVD.

I'm not familiar with that machine but judging be the fact that you described it as "older" you probably won't be able to use a vanilla kernel and may need some drivers installed during the initial installation that are only available in those Leopard distros. My recommendation would be to take a look at that guide and try to build a USB drive in the same fashion but with one of your Leopard distros. I'm not completely familiar with how Chameleon works so it may not work at all on your machine but it's worth a shot. If it doesn't maybe you could try some different boot loader options. Lemme know how it goes.

Jamie