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.
Topic says it.can't install due to 'still waiting for root device'. I've taken a Mac OS X 10.6 Server DVD, created a cdr image of it in OS X (due to the fact that the DVD is dual layer, and the Windows machine here has only a single layer DVD), and attached it to IDE Primary.
Used Hardware
Mac Os High Sierra Still Waiting For Root Device
- What does “Still waiting for root device” means? It means that a driver/kext for the source from which you are booting is not detected properly by the mac operating system (USB kext not detected or loaded) Mac OS released prebuilt with the latest drivers that supports SATA out of.
- The Mac Mini's HD will be mounted as an external HD in the non-corrupted computer. Find and save your valuable data. Afterwards, making a Clean Install is the usual and fastest way of solving this issue. “Still waiting for root device” on a macbook pro mid 2009 with osx 10.11.6.
- 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
inBIOS
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) andRepair Permissions
from within theDisk 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 :-)