SO CLOSE! Asus P9X79 Booting Problem - Help?

[rongrandia]

A grateful good morning from the SF Bay Area. I have been lurking for about a week and took the plunge yesterday, spent a pile of cash and happily building away thanks to all the GREAT input from this really cool forum - Thank you EVERYBODY. This is so much fun.

Up till now...

I can't seem to get this thing booting reliably from the Unibeast flash drive I created - I keep getting "Reboot and select proper boot device...."

Then I'll goof around in the bios, get it to boot, install from Unibeast to the SSD. If I boot from the Flash Drive, and then select the new install, OSX Lion (Freshly downloaded from App Store Yesterday) runs like a dream (Still have not started customizing from Multibeast)

But - When I test to see if I can BOOT to the new install, No soap. "Reboot and select proper boot device.) Subsequent attempts to boot from the flash drive, same problem.
Then I'll fool around in the Bios, get it going again from the flash drive, rinse, repeat.

Not a cheapie Flash Drive (Patriot 8gig)

SATA config - AHCI
Boot Option 1 = Flash Drive
Boot Option 2 = SSD (of course I've tried this a million different ways)

I tried booting from the flash drive on my MB Air - works like a charm.


Any thoughts? THANKS IN ADVANCE!

Going to Fry's for a second SSD as a Windows Drive. Guess I'll work on that for a while.




System Description
ASUS P9X79
Intel i73930 @3.2 (for now)
16 GB DDR3
EVGA GeForce GT430
Antec EarthWatts 750 PS
Coolermaster HAF 922
Coolermaster HAF 922 Case

 

[rongrandia]

AHA!

Chimera needed to be installed to make the whole shebangy work. I REALLY did read everything - but a lot of this does not make a lot of sense to me until I pound it in with a few hours of failure.

Still not sure why the Mobo was fighting that flash drive, and that is creating an ongoing problem, as I can't reliably boot into this to address other problems like the one below.

UPDATE - This Mobo has a "Boot Override" feature, so I can go into the bios and manually override to the Unibeast flash-drive. Not elegant, but working.

Now I'm stuck at the "Apple" bootup window. Booting verbose and seeing a lot of stuff I don't understand. Seems to hang at

'EFI ROM did not publish "hda gfx" yadda yadda.

Careful re-examination of all the stuff I am adding with Multibeast found some goofs, but still same result on restarts.

Still, it's progress, right?

 

[rongrandia]

Solved - kind of.

Reinstalled OS via Unibeast, booted fine WITH graphics and network. Reinstalled audio. Not sure what I did, but it seems to be working.

Meanwhile, my network switch in my office just started freaking out. I think it's dying. Ack.

Looking forward to learning lots here! Thanks again.