[brazim01]

Hi, I'm new to the forum and grateful for any help you might be able to offer. I am in the process of trying to install Snow Leopard on a Mini 9. I have upgraded the SSD to 16gb and boosted the memory. I am trying to use this method:

Install Snow Leopard on Your Hackintosh PC, No Hacking Required - Hackintosh - Lifehacker

Everything was going fine up to the point of installation, My bios is A05 and I have set it to boot automatically from the USB thumb drive. The boot starts and it picks up the drive and presents me with an Apple Drive Icon called OS Snow leopard (or something along those lines)which is obviously the tumbdrive. When I click on that option, rather than being asked to select my language (as per the video), I am told to restart the computer with this message:

"You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button until it turns off, then press the Power button again."

I restart the computer but am then taken back to the beggining and ultimately end up with the same message meaning I'm stuck in a loop and making no progress.

Does anybody have any advice as to where I may be going wrong?

Sorry for the length of the post but I am relatively non-technical and want to ensure I'm providing enough information,

Thanks,

[RabidMax]

A very nice and detailed first post, I'm sure someone here will be able to help.

However I'm not sure if the guide you followed will be well known here, it uses a different application to 'fix' the thumbdrive for booting.

If you have the time and inclination, you might want to check out NetbookInstaller, which seems to be something similar but might work better for you. It also seems to be the installer of choice on these forums, so would likely get better support?

NetbookInstaller 0.8.3 RC3 Released Meklort's Blog

Good luck on your install!
Max

[brazim01]

Hi guys, further to my last post. I have looked at the netbook installer as suggested and tried to run through the whole process again. What I've found (and this may have happened on my original attempt without me noticing) is that when I go through the restore step to put a bootable version of Snow Leopard on te thumb drive, I get a message at the end of the restore saying:

"Restore Failure - Could Not Restore - Cannot Allocate Memory"

I guess this could be my problem, any ideas about this? I have tried three times now with the same message coming up every time.

Thanks,

---------- Post added at 10:20 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:28 AM ----------

Hi folks, a quick update - I have tried to install the OS using Netbook Installer and have managed to get to the language selection page (this is with a bootable copy of the OS on a thumb drive which failed to restore properly as per my last post). I can select English as the language and then move to the preparing installation page. At this point the process seems to freeze, the progress bar has the usual moving blue dashes but I have left the page as it is for over half an hour with no change.

Any thoughts? Am I just being impatient or is this a common fault/ issue?

Thanks again,

[chewy]

did you partition the drive and set GUID?

I did have that reset screen on one try. rebooted and the next try it worked.

my flash drive wouldn't boot, so I used the netbookCD of mechdrew to start, then used my copy of SL on the flash drive. (the DVD wasn't recognized from the CD boot)

Guides | OS X | mechdrew

the one time that it hung on install after getting as far as you did, was when there was a problem with insufficient space on the SSD. I had hoped that it could upgrade from leopard to SL without erasing, but did not have enough space.

what OS are you starting with (though i suppose it should not matter if you are booting from the netbookinstaller).

also, I saw that restore error at some point, but got beyond it with no problem.

[brazim01]

Hi thanks for your help, I actually got everything set up and working (including the audio via the headphone jack). It has been great all day but then I left it plugged in and let it go to sleep, when I returned it will no loner boot and is telling me that no operating system can be found.

I'm hoping there is something I can do that won't involve me having to go through the process again. I ended up using an external HD but had to move a lot of backed up info off it and then back again afterwards.

If anybody has any ideas, I would be very grateful,

Thanks,

[chewy]

did you run the netbook installer to copy the chameleon bootloader on there? that seems to be the thing that loads first, then you go into snow leopard

on the sleep, I used the smart sleep mentioned here, and it wakes up with the silver button now. (hasn't worked for some people, though)

DellMini9 Runcore SSD/10.6.1/NI 083 RC3 (Full Sound, Sleep, Reliable Restart!)

specifically here

Apple - Downloads - System/Disk Utilities - SmartSleep

some people have used his ideas to back their boot up more reliable. I haven't had to use any of the other steps yet.

[brazim01]

Hi, thanks for the info. I'm fairly non-technical so I may i'm not sure whether I fully understand all of this but the story so far is..

- disk utility used to format retail sl disk to bootable format on external hd
- opened netbook bootmaker 0.8.3 RC3 and saved to the OSX.dmg partition on the hd
- Installed osx from the newly formatted external hd

Apart from the odd slip this all went quite smoothly and as of this morning everything was working well. I then installed MS Office, Ilife 09, Firefox and one or two other programs I will use on a day to day basis. I also replaced some azalia files with voodoo files to fix the headphone audio issue.

This evening I was using the netbook and screen sharing with my MBP to control a movie I was watching, I let the netbook go to sleep and when I have tried to reboot I just get messages telling me there is no operating system. I have tried to reinstall but even with a clean install I cannot get the system to boot after restart.

Thanks for your help so far,

[chewy]

did you do this part, from mechdrew's guide

# This time, run NetbookInstaller from either the CD or download the latest version (if possible). Select the following settings:

* Volume: <your internal drive>
* Install Chameleon 2 RC3 bootloader
* Install <your model name> Extensions
* Generate a system specific dsdt.aml file
* <Any other options you would like, the above are necessary.>

# Press Install.
# Enter your password and press OK.
# When installation is complete, press OK.
# Restart your computer.

complete guide is here

NetbookInstaller 3: Installation via External DVD Drive using NetbookCD | Guides | OS X | mechdrew

[brazim01]

I didn't use that particular guide, more of a mish mash of other guides until I got a result. I seem to have resolved the problem after lots of messing and a reinstall. Everything is now fully functional, I don't appear to be able to get rid of the sleep problem but have reset the sleep preferences so that it doesn't go to sleep.

It also seems to have some reboot problems when not shut down properly but this is easily avoidable for the most part.

Thanks for all the advice guys,

[s081316]

Originally Posted by brazim01

Hi guys, further to my last post. I have looked at the netbook installer as suggested and tried to run through the whole process again. What I've found (and this may have happened on my original attempt without me noticing) is that when I go through the restore step to put a bootable version of Snow Leopard on te thumb drive, I get a message at the end of the restore saying:

"Restore Failure - Could Not Restore - Cannot Allocate Memory"

I guess this could be my problem, any ideas about this? I have tried three times now with the same message coming up every time.

Thanks,

---------- Post added at 10:20 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:28 AM ----------

Hi folks, a quick update - I have tried to install the OS using Netbook Installer and have managed to get to the language selection page (this is with a bootable copy of the OS on a thumb drive which failed to restore properly as per my last post). I can select English as the language and then move to the preparing installation page. At this point the process seems to freeze, the progress bar has the usual moving blue dashes but I have left the page as it is for over half an hour with no change.

Any thoughts? Am I just being impatient or is this a common fault/ issue?

Thanks again,

Regarding the "Restore Failure - Could Not Restore - Cannot Allocate Memory" error - I had this too, and the problem was the flash drive. I bought a 16GB drive on ebay. It was superficially OK (properties showed 16 GB), but I got that error. I downloaded and ran h2testw.exe to test the flashdrive. h2testw.exe reported that only 384 MB was writable, and the rest of the sectors were corrupted (likely they were just not there, and the drive was counterfeit). I went to the store and bought one, which tested OK. At that point everything was fine and I did not see the error.