[Beau Cottington]

I am back to full steam, this is what fixed my problem:

Symptoms: “Still waiting for root device” – NO sign; saveboot works (holding right shift on boot)

Solution:
After trying everything,

Disk utility (on safeboot, on install disk, on another mac)
DiskWarrior (on safeboot, on bootdvd, on anothert mac)
fsck (even advanced options)
pram reset
smc reset
etc. in all possible configuration, by even removing the disk from the unibody case and attaching it via USB to another mac.

I finally found a solution. These failures are always due to faulty BIOS settings or faulty kexts on OSX86. But since I am on a MacbookPRO, there is no BIOS.

Long speech short

Replace IOStorageFamily.kext in /System/Library/Extensions with one from a working mac, or from the installation disc using Pacifist, or whichever way you prefere.

Fix permissions and ownership, repair permissions with discutility. Remove caches.

And you are good to go.

I can imagine that sometimes other kexts may be the faulty ones. In such cases it is always good to analize verbose mode first.

This is how I managed to fix my problem without having to reinstall.

[Beau Cottington]

Yes and Yes, safe mode works fine. And I tried to start up my wife’s computer using my drive as the startup disc and it did the same shit, the “no” sign… So this just got weird. I am convinced it is software botch up. Trying to Reinstall prior versions

[Beau Cottington]

Thanks for your help I will let you know what I find… cheers

[Beau Cottington]

sorry for the double post I am pretty rookie here =)

[Beau Cottington]

I will try that next. Hardware issue is my main worry, however the drive seems to be functioning fine when accessed externally and safe mode functions great. In addition to that I ran the apple hardware diagnostic disk and it functioned fine and everything checked out good. Just for some reason it is blocking me from startup up from the OSX install disc.

I think it would have to be a seriously rare coincidence that I could have installed this update and had a hardware issue exactly when it tried to reboot. I am thinking the update could have had an error, even though it appeared to be successful. I have a later version OSX startup disc I got from work to try, and I also downloaded the updates to try and apply them locally. I am also going to try and boot up from an external drive to be sure I am not dealing with a drive going bad on me.