I just realized it's been a long time since I posted under the All Things Mac category. Almost 3 years really. I had a Mac (at a really good price), I lost it, while I would love to buy a Mac Pro I can't justify the insane price (my Quicksilver in 2002 was no speed demon, but it was competitively priced at $1100, refurb.) I do wish I could have sprung for the iMac 24". The screen is so much better than the 20" but I still couldn't get over the asking price. In the end I built my own. Its been a headache, with random error messages (and missing a lot of the functionality and quietness of a Mac Pro. But it is my baby. Chosen from a list of carefully researched and selected components.
So now I'm back to buying Mac software once again. I have all my CDs from the quicksilver but the applications were compiled for Panther. Which might as well be Windows 98 in Apple years. No I'm looking at building, buying, or downloading all new ones. I've been checking the MacHeist bundles for something good. but I don't see anything useful, yet.
I've been struggling with my custom PC over the weekend. After ordering, waiting, and assembling the parts it just didn't go all the way like I wanted it to. My Gigabyte P35-DS3R was stuck at "Verifying DMI Pool...". I searched all over the internet about why I would be stuck at "Verifying DMI Pool......" after assembling everything correctly. I tested the motherboard to see if overclocking the easily overclockable Q6600 was the proper. Not. I thought the order of SATA drives was the problem. Not. I thought the drive had gone bad between the time I plugged it in the first time and the time I restarted the computer. A disk check later, not. So I disabled the ACHI capabilities. Meaning I would loose Hot-disconnect, NCQ, and RAID. This basically made the computer I planned to build with nearly unlimited capabilities, incapable of doing some of the things I would like in the near future.
So I browsed the forums and checked other posts on the same board, and I got nothing. One day I was browsing the OSx86 forums and someone with an ABIT IP35 (a similar chipset with similar features) mentioned the Boot Order in BIOS.
Apparently, my Pioneer DVD Drive is no longer recognized as CDROM, but as PIONEER-DVR... down in the bottom of the list if bootable devices in BIOS. It's important that CDROM is not selected if you are using AHCI or else it will hang everytime. Realizing this might be the problem I'm having I changed the BIOS, booted and got the "Press any key to boot from CDROM". Yes!
I posted this here in case someone else with a gigabyte P35-DS3R motherboard also encounters this Verifying DMI Pool error. Maybe the search engine gods will have this in a useful search.