OSX "Waiting on boot device" error

**bawalker** · April 13th, 2006, 08:43 PM

Hello all,

Previously I posted regarding having problems getting my Dual G4 450 system to boot OSX while it booted OS9 just fine. I spent more time doing researching and found that when watching the install disc (worked previously) is booting in verbose mode, it will hang with the message "Still waiting on boot device" and it will display that over and over again.

However as I was researching this, I took notice of what was listed immediately before the boot device error. It started off as: From path: "/pci@f2000000/pci-bridge@d/mac-io@7/ata-3@200000/disk@0:9,\mach_kernel",
which as I later learned is the location of the boot device (cd or hdd) being booted from. More importantly the disk@0:9 in my case is the disk and partition that the boot program is looking for.

In my case I do NOT have 9 partitions so after more reading I went into the NVRAM/Open Firmware settings to change this. I changed the boot-device setting via the setenv boot-device command to reflect a disk@0:0 setting but that did not help. I even reset the entire nvram and pram settings to factory defaults. That did not help at all. The boot program on the CD CONTINUED to reference the disk@0:9 location even after I made the changes in the firmware.

How can I go about solving this? OS9 works fine, as does the different PPC flavors of linux.

**bawalker** · April 13th, 2006, 10:58 PM

It's an original medium.

**ElDiabloConCaca** · April 14th, 2006, 08:49 AM

Do you have an ATA or SATA PCI card?

**bawalker** · April 14th, 2006, 10:54 AM

Yes I do, it's a Promise Ultra100 tx2 pci card that I inserted but it didn't resolve the issue. Or did I not do something correct?

Originally Posted by ElDiabloConCaca

Do you have an ATA or SATA PCI card?

**ElDiabloConCaca** · April 14th, 2006, 03:59 PM

From your error log in the first post, it looks like there's a problem recognizing the PCI card... has that card always worked, or is it a new addition to the computer?

**bawalker** · April 14th, 2006, 04:25 PM

Actually when I bought the PowerMac there was no PCI IDE adapter included in the powermac. At the time it had OS9.1 on it and OS9 worked great, I updated to OS9.2.2 after buying that from eBay. Finally I borrowed my friends retail (non machine specific) OSX 10.2 and 10.3 CDs to make sure the G4 could use OSX. OSX installed *perfectly* at the time so I went out and got myself a boxed copy.

However at the time I needed memory for a PC so I took the memory from my PowerMac and used it in the PC. Last month I purchased 2 x 256mb of apple compatible PC133 memory from Omni Technologies (omnitechnologies.biz) and stuck it in the computer. The Mac booted up perfectly and I was instantly able to go back into OS9 without problems.

However when I attempted to boot from my OSX hard drive or any OSX cd, the system would give the "Prohibited" sign with the spinning indicator under it. The system would sit there forever if I didn't powerdown. I then used verbose-mode to monitor what was happening during an install or boot from either the OSX cd's or OSX hard drive. Each time I would get the above message and message of "Still waiting for root device..."

After massive amounts of research for a few weeks online, I found one site that said OSX probably wasn't liking the factory DVD rom drive I had on it. I thought that was kind of weird because the same discs worked on the same setup before. But I went ahead and swapped out the factory dvd-rom drive with a IOMagic/BTC branded dual layer dvd burner which had worked with the system previously. Again I received the same "Still waiting for root device..." error.

Finally I came across several websites that showed me how to modify the open firmware environment settings such as the boot-device option. I went in and reset the nvram, pram, and reset all settings to factory default. Upon rebooting from the CD (wanted to do a clean install of OSX) I got the SAME problem all over again. However I noticed that even though I changed the boot-device in the openfirmware to reflect ...disk@0:0..., the verbose mode showed that the CD was trying to access ...disk@0:9..., or partition 9 on disk 0. As if it didn't even accept or take hold of the openfirmware setting changes I made. I went back into the open firmware and amazing, the settings I changed the values too, remained there.

I really don't know what to do. I love this dual 450mhz box and would love to get Tiger running, but right now every PPC version of linux and OS9 runs great, but OSX simply won't install OR boot.

I tested the IDE PCI adapter early on when it appeared I was having problems booting from an IDE device, thinking it may have been a hardware issue. Using the IDE PCI adapter made no difference so I removed it and connected the Mac back up to it's factory default settings.

**camgangrel21** · April 14th, 2006, 10:24 PM

you might try takeing the RAM that you put in to the PC and moveing over to Mac and use the RAM that you where useing before. Because every new Ver of OS X has gotten more picky about the ram it uses. I know I had RAM in my old G3 mac that OS 9.2.2 loved and worked with but OS X would not use it. It may be just one stick of the new RAM that you are running. try takeing one out and see if will boot if not put that one back in and try takeing the other one out. if all that does not work then try what I first said that might work.
Sorry about the other post. My bad. I did not read all of your post.

**bawalker** · April 14th, 2006, 10:46 PM

Unfortunately getting back the orginial ram can't happen. The reason it was so quickly needed was that my computer business (PC based) ran very low on inventory for memory and three customer computers needed memory upgrades. They are long gone by now.

Where can I get certified, guaranteed to work with G4 Powermac "Sawtooth" memory?

Although I am grealy confused as to why memory would cause an error of not allowing OSX to recognize the partition.