[tenders]

Summary:
* Experienced Mini 9 Hackintoshed Dell Mini no longer runs OS X
* It runs Win7 fine
* Other Mini 9 Dell Mini will run the intended installation of OS X
* Something is clearly wrong with the Experienced Dell Mini
* What am I missing?

I've been using a Dell Mini 9 running OS X 10.5.7 for 2.5 years. Over that time I used it heavily, wore out the stock battery, replaced with a high-capacity battery, and flashed to A05. Ran perfectly. I've since Hackintoshed several Minis for friends without incident.

A month ago my STEC 16GB SSD seemed to be booting a little less reliably so I wiped it, intending to put some version of 10.6 on it.

I've spent dozens of hours over the last month trying various methods of installing 10.6.0 and 10.6.3 using the retail DVDs and systematically used NBI 0.8.3 and 0.8.4 (didn't use 0.5.8, seems too alpha and unnecessary). I've been installing from to different machines running 10.6. No dice whatsoever - the Mini is very slow to get past the "Apple" screen and thereafter freezes on a grey screen. When booting with the -v and seems to bog down during the boot process on some IO kext, but I'm not sure that's actually the problem. Sometimes after loading and waiting a very long time, llike 30 minutes, the Apple Setup process will run and I can hear it, the keyboard is responsive, but the screen is completely blue.

It seems as if there's a big driver problem going on. Here's the last bit of the most recent effort:

Kext com.apple.iokit.IOBluetoothSerialManager - library kext com.apple.iokit. IOSerialFamily not found.
Can't load kext com.apple.iokit.IOBluetoothSerialManager - failed to resolve library dependencies.
Kext com.apple.iokit.IOBluetoothSerialManager failed to load (0xdc00800e).
Failed to load kext com.apple.iokit.IOBluetoothSerialManager (error 0xdc00800e)
Couldn't alloc class "IOBluetoothSerialManager"
AirPort: Link Down on en1. Reason 4 (Disassociated due to inactivity).
Mini9MuteControl: setting to 0
Mini9MuteControl: done
Auth result for: 00:1f:90:f2:59:a0 MAC AUTH succeeded
AirPort: Link Up on en1

I've done this to the internal STEC 16GB SSD and also bought a RunCore 32GB SSD with an external USB enclosure. Installing from an external machine and running NBI seems to work fine, I've even booted the external machine using the SSD intended for the Dell Mini, but it stops working when the SSD is put into the Mini 9.

Frustrated, I tried to put Windows 7 on it...and it worked perfectly, the first time. In fact I'm posting from it now. THERE APPEARS TO BE NOTHING WRONG WITH THE DELL MINI WHATSOEVER.

Finally, this weekend I tried to boot another identical Dell Mini with the new 32GB SSD running 10.6.0...and that worked perfectly, the first time. I upgraded to 10.6.1, it ran on the other Dell Mini just fine, but resulted in the same problem when I placed that demonstrably working SSD into my usual Dell Mini. THERE APPEARS TO BE NOTHING WRONG WITH THE SSD OR MY PROCEDURES WHATSOEVER.

I subsequently reflashed to A03 and A04 with no change.

What could be going on here? I'm starting to think it's a hardware or firmware problem.