Installing OS X on a Dell Mini 9
Please not that these instructions are based largely on those on the Dell Mini forum, you should definitely read those before you start. This post it meant to fill in some of the gaps I found whilst installing.
Things to do BEFORE installing OS X
Before you start there are some thing you need to check whilst you have the original OS installed. Check that the wifi and bluetooth (if you bought that option) are switched on. People have had problems with being unable to switch these on post OS X install.
Stuff you will need
- Dell Mini 9 (Whilst it is possible to install OSX on the default 8GB drive it won’t be much fun to use. I opted for the 16GB and an 8GB SD card.)
- A legal retail copy of Leopard
- The Type 11 iso boot image
Burn the Type 11 iso image to disk, if you don’t have an external drive you will need to use the USB method. I had trouble booting my Leopard DVD so I used a CD of Type 11 and an SD card based OS X install.
If your OS X disk isn’t the latest version (10.5.6 as I write this) and you have another mac available it is quicker to download the combo 10.5.6 update from the Apple website rather than wait for the Mini 9 to use the Software Update.
Installing OS X
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Boot up the Mini 9 with the Type 11 disk (press 0 at boot to select the external drive). It should present you with a prompt. You now need to boot into the Leopard install. Press Enter, then follow the onscreen instructions for booting from Leopard. As I was using an SD card plugged into the right hand side USB slot I had to type 81. You should see the grey Leopard install screen.
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Use the menu and choose Disk Utility to format your internal drive to Mac OS Extended. Do not to use Journaled or Case-sensitive (Case-sensitive won’t boot – I found this out the hard way).
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Make sure you deselect the extra languages and printer divers, this saved several gigabytes of space for me. Apart from that follow the normal procedure for installing OS X, it will take about an hour. It is quite likely you will get a notification at the end that the install failed, ignore it.
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Restart the machine, booting from the Type 11 disk again. This time at the relevant prompt select the internal drive to load Leopard off, should be 80. Then on the final prompt type -f this should enable it to load without problems.
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Update Leopard using either the Software Update option in the apple menu or the combo file you downloaded earlier.
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Reboot from the Type 11 disk yet again. Same instructions as above.
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Install the DellEFI app from the DellMini9Utils on the Type 11 disk.
- If all went well you should be able to unplug the external boot device and boot up from the Mini 9’s drive.
Post install
To enable sleep you need to disable Legacy USB Support in the Mini 9 bios settings.
Run a Time Machine backup, being a hackintosh things may not work in quite the same way as normal and this will save you a lot of time.
That’s it, you should be left with about 6Gb of space on the SSD to install any apps you want.