Long time no see to this old friend called “Still waiting for root device”. But with 10.5.7 the time had come again. As some of the tipps we compiled below helped us there is no warranty that it will help you. As the reasons for this funky brother are too indifferent.

Used Hardware

• Gigabyte GA EP35 DS3
• Gigabyte nVidia GeForce 7600 GT 256MB (Device ID 0x0391)
• HP w2207 TFT (w/ integrated USB hub)
• Buffalo AirStation WLI2-PCI-G54S (recognized as Third Party Wireless Card)

What you may try

• Unplug external USB drives and devices

• Unplug other internal drives
• Instead of Rebooting: Shutdown and wait a couple of secs before manually turning your HackMac on again
• Enable AHCI in BIOS for your drives (in case you see drive icons in orange, apply kexts included with the binaries’ release of Chameleon 2)
• Try to boot into Safe Mode with -x (see more Darwin flags here) and
  Repair Permissions from within the Disk Utility.app
• Remove the Extensions.mkext and rebuild it (cf. OSX86Project)
  myMek: rm /System/Library/Extensions.mkext
myMek: kextcache -k /System/Library/Extensions/
myMek: kextcache -L -N -e

About our test environment

This is based on the approach to install from the original unmodified retail DVD. Buy it, please. And also go and buy a MacBook (Pro) aswell, you will need it anyway as your HackMac will need special treatments once in a while. A HackMac can never be intended for productive environment. Don’t forget this. No matter what a clone manufacturer or a USB dongle merchant says.

Anyway as we are quite conservative with running systems we don’t feel we need to change to often ways. That’s why we’re still using our own EPOS I. (download here) approach, which is based on Munky’s (more info here) findings.

Good Luck! And don’t forget to buy a Mac :-)