Dec 5

How to dual-boot Snow Leopard and Windows on a Dell Mini 10v netbook

breadslice:



This is pretty much going to be a straight-forward guide of getting everything set up on a fresh, blank hard drive using the Chameleon bootloader, with OSX set as the default operating system. I’m using the terms fresh/blank because the partitioning process is essentially going to be destructive, unless you use GParted on a previously existing installation (which I’m not going to cover).

What you will need to complete the install:

  1. NetbookBootMaker (latest stable release, at time of writing, is 0.8.2).
  2. A Snow Leopard retail OR upgrade disc (I used the upgrade disc that I’ve ordered for my iMac; they are virtually identical and you can use it for a fresh install regardless of the “upgrade” title).
  3. A Windows XP/7 installation disc (I used XP; Vista never recommended).
  4. An 8GB+ USB flash drive (16GB recommended; I used a 16GB OCZ Diesel).
  5. An external USB CD/DVD drive (or a 1GB USB flash drive if you use WinToFlash).
  6. Access to another Mac/Hackintosh with Administrator access or the ability to escalate to Administrator access.
  7. A Dell Mini 10v with a BIOS of less than A06 (you can downgrade via this tutorial).

Preparation:
  1. On another Mac/Hackintosh, go into /Applications/Utilities and launch Disk Utility.
  2. Insert your Snow Leopard installation media.
  3. Insert your 8GB/16GB USB flash drive and select it on the left column.
  4. Click on the “Erase” tab and change the format dropbox to “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” (you may name the drive whatever you wish; I simply used “Hackintosh”)
  5. Once it’s done formatting, click on the “Restore” tab.
  6. Drag and drop the Snow Leopard DVD, titled “Mac OS X Install DVD”, from the left column and drop it into the Source box.
  7. Drag and drop your newly formatted USB flash drive into the destination box.
  8. Uncheck the Erase Destination box.
  9. Click on the Restore button, and then click Restore on the following popup.
  10. It’s going to take nearly 2 hours to complete, but during the whole process of copying over the Snow Leopard DVD, your screen should look similar to mine.
  11. When the restore is done, launch NetbookBootMaker and select your USB flash drive and press the button “Prepare Boot Drive”, which will require Administrator access. This will patch your Snow Leopard installation so that it’s bootable with the Chameleon bootloader, as well as automatically including the NetbookInstaller application during the installation process.
  12. OPTIONAL STEP: If you have access to a Windows machine, you can use WinToFlash to make another 1GB+ USB flash drive to be bootable with your Windows installation disk. Just copy the entire installation disk to a folder on your drive via drag and drop. Launch WinToFlash, choose the folder you’ve just ripped the Windows disc to for the box labeled “Windows files path” and choose your flash drive for “USB drive.” Wait for the process to complete and you’ll now have a bootable Windows installation drive. If you are using this method, you may substitute any subsequent references to the external CD/DVD drive with this flash drive.
  13. Boot the 10v into the BIOS (press F2 on POST; it should say “Setup”), and press the right arrow until you get into the “Advanced” tab.
  14. Disable bluetooth and enable USB legacy support (vice versa if your unit has bluetooth installed) and enable USB wake support. Save and exit by pressing F10.
  15. You are now ready to start installing the operating systems (phew!).

Partitioning:
  1. Boot into your Hackintosh USB drive by pressing F12 on POST and choosing the USB flash drive (there should be a + sign next to it).
  2. After the installer loads, press enter on the initial screen to set English as your default language (or any other, if need be).
  3. Click on Utilities on the top menu and choose Disk Utility.
  4. Select your internal hard drive on the left column and choose the Partition tab.
  5. In “Volume Scheme”, choose 2 partitions and resize them as you like. By default, both of the partitions are evenly divided.
  6. Choose the first partition and format it as “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” (which is really HFS+) and name it as you please (I used “Macintosh HD”). This will be the name of your hard drive after you install Snow Leopard. In the 2nd partition, format it as “MS-DOS (FAT)”. The name doesn’t matter for this one since the Windows installation changes it anyways.
  7. Click apply and accept the warning. Your drive is now set up for 2 OSes.
  8. Restart your Mini 10v.

Installing Windows:
  1. Connect your external CD/DVD drive, with the Windows installation DVD already inserted, to one of the USB ports and boot into it using F12 again.
  2. When the installer asks for the installation destination, choose the FAT32 partition you created earlier (it’s the only one that says FAT; the Windows installer is unable to recognize the HFS partition). Format it with NTFS (quick).
  3. Once it’s done formatting, it’ll automatically restart and go through the rest of the setup process. The only thing remaining is restoring the drivers and applications (hint: if installing XP, they’re all on a DVD that came with the 10v).
  4. Your Windows OS is now set up. You don’t have much to do other than installing any other necessary software that you may use.
  5. Restart your Mini 10v.

Installing Snow Leopard:
  1. Boot into your Hackintosh flash drive via F12 on POST again.
  2. Go through the initial screens and select your Mac-formatted partition you’ve made in the preparation steps. It’s the hard drive icon that says “Macintosh HD” if you’ve followed how I’ve named things.
  3. On the following screen, make sure you click on the “Customize” button on the lower left and uncheck all the boxes you won’t need. This will cut down on the operating system’s foot print post-install.
  4. Keep pressing next on any subsequent screen and the install will initiate and eventually complete. It may take up to an hour. After which it’ll prompt to restart.
  5. Restart your Mini 10v when it tells you to. But what’s this?! Why is it still booting to Windows XP?

Setting OSX as the default OS:

Update: this step is not necessary beginning with NBI 0.83 RC3.

  1. By default, the earlier Windows installation set its own partition as the active one, so you’ll have to do a bit of command-line magic to have it boot into OSX. Otherwise, your 10v is always going to boot into Windows unless you edit the boot.ini to include OSX (which is ugly and too much of a hassle IMO).
  2. Boot back into the Hackintosh flash drive and go into Terminal under Utilities.
  4. Type out the following command to get the disk number and partition of OSX (in most instances, it’s most likely going to be disk0s2):
    diskutil list
  5. Type out the following command to allow you to set the active partition:
    fdisk -e /dev/rdiskX

    (where X is the number of the disk that you’re OSX installation is located on)
    1. fdisk - fdisk stands for “fixed disk” and it’s a command-line utility used to create/edit partitions. There is an fdisk for both Windows and Unix-like system, but each of them behave differently.
    2. -e - a switch for fdisk. It allows you to edit a particular disk, via its partition table, that is specified.
    3. /dev/rdiskX - denotes the target disk that is desired for edit.

    You may run into an error stating that the Master Boot Record (MBR) is unable to be opened. You can safely ignore this message. I haven’t run into any problems.
  6. Type out the following command to print out all of the partitions on the disk:
    p
    Take note of the number of your OSX partition; it’s the one that states the name of your hard drive.
  7. Type out this command to flag your OSX partition as the active partition:
    f X
    (where X is the number of your OSX partition)
  8. Type out the following command to save your edits:
    write
    (on the following screen, type out yes because you do want to save the edits)
  9. Type exit get out of disk mode.
  10. Quit Terminal and the OSX installer, and then restart.
  11. You should now see the Chameleon bootloader (!). But all is not well.

Setting up Snow Leopard:
  1. During the initial Chameleon loading screen, press any key once.
  2. Type out -x to get into Safe Boot, otherwise you won’t get past the Apple logo screen.
  3. Go into /Applications and launch NetbookInstaller
  4. Once in NetbookInstaller, select your hard drive from the “Volume” dropbox.
  5. Make sure only the following options are selected:

    1. Install Dell Mini 10v Extensions
    2. Generate a system specific dsdt.am file
    3. Disable hibernation and remove sleep file (reconmended) [sic]

    “Hide NetbookInstaller Files”, “Enable Remote CD”, “Enable Quiet Boot”, and “Install old mirror friendly GMA kext” are optional. Do NOT check “Fix bluetooth” unless your system has an internal bluetooth module, or else your sound will not function (not sure why, but it won’t). Mirror friendly GMA kext is only needed if you mirror to an external monitor. If you select this, you won’t have QuartzExtreme/CoreImage enabled. That means many applications, such as iWork and Preview, will not work.
  6. Click install, input your password, and let the process finish.
  7. Restart your Mini 10v and you should now be able to boot into Snow Leopard without the use of the -x boot switch.

Editing the AAM/APM to reduce the LCC count:

One of the most imporant thing, in terms of hard drive lifetime as well as acoustics, is the LCC, or Load Cycle Count. The LCC is the count of how many times the actuator parks into the Landing Zone position (the area on the hard drive that is designated for the read/write heads to rest on while the hard drive spins down; the heads are “lifted” as the platters spin up due to a slight movement of air).

The AAM/APM (automatic acoustic management and advance power management, respectively) is designed to be fairly aggressive in order to reduce power drain. Often, the read/write heads are parked in a matter of seconds (think around five). Notebooks need very aggressive power management in order to be light on the battery usage. The problem with a number of modern operating systems is that they often do write cycles after the heads have been parked (OSX is around eight seconds).

For everyday users, this becomes annoying in terms of noise. You can hear a hard drive click every 10 or so seconds as the heads are parked and unparked repeatedly. Long term usage can potentially be much more disastrous. Many hard drives typically have a LCC threshold of around 300,000 to 600,000. Depending on usage pattern, this can mean that some hard drives will exceed the threshold in as little as one year of usage (I hope people are keeping regular backups!). Now, onto how to keep the LCC from unnecessarily increasing.

Under OSX, I was unable to edit the AAM/APM using hdapm. I’m not sure why, but every time it was run, it would state that my hard drive did not support that feature (I’m using a WD1600BEVT, which should be a Western Digital Caviar Blue). I would receive the following errors in my Console:
hdapm[278] disk0: WDC WD1600BEVT-75ZCT2
hdapm[278] Setting APM level to 0xfe:
hdapm[278] FAILED: APM not supported
com.apple.launchd[1] (hdapm[278]) Exited with exit code: 1
What I did was I booted into XP and used quietHDD and set all AAM and APM settings to at least 200 and left the default 254/255 ones as they were (the higher the setting, the less the hard drive spins down and parks the heads). I guess this setting carried over to OSX as well (firmware level?) since my LCC count via smartctl show no increase in my LCC on idle.

Edit: it looks like the changes are not persistent. After a shutdown, the hard drive settings go back to normal and the LCC count continue to increase if you do not boot into XP and run quietHDD :(

Congratulations. You now have a working dual-boot Hackintosh.

Via: ballad of the windfish
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