[frodo]

Thanks to so many people for posting solutions, questions, and answers related to installing Mac OS X / Snow Leopard (SL) as well as Windows7 on a Dell Mini10v. In case this helps someone else, I thought I would post the highlights of my learning this past weekend when I spent somewhere around 15 hours messing around with different configuration options until I finally got everything working. On my Snow Leopard installation my sound works great (both playback and recording using Audacity,) the battery shows an accurate time remaining, and my sleep function even seems to work too! All of those were things I've read on other posts that DIDN'T work in some cases. So far I haven't found anything that DOESN'T work on my install of Mac OSX. I haven't spent as much time on the Win7 side, but there everything looks good too.

My basic procedures to get my Dell Mini10v dual booting SL and Win7 were:
1- Roll back BIOS from A06 to A04 (otherwise you get a kernel panic error when installing MacOS)
2- Partition hard drive and install Mac OS 10.6
3- Install Windows 7
4- Use EasyBCD to configure dual booting

I ended up doing this several times because of mistakes I made. The biggest one was trying to install Ubuntu Netbook Remix with its default settings. Its bootloader messed things up and I ended up starting over. I like this Ubuntu distribution and at some point hope to get Ubuntu also running on my Mini10v, but for now I'm happy with SL and Win7. I have heard the beta Ubuntu 9.10 is really fast on Netbooks.

The sites and resources I used to get my installation working were:
- MacOS 10.6 SL installation DVD
- MacBook Pro running MacOS 10.6.1
- Win7 Installation ISO image
- WindowsXP running via Parallels on my Mac (needed to create Windows bootable USB drives)
- Disk Utility on the MB Pro
- an 8 GB flash drive for the MacOS installation (bought at Radio Shack for $25)
- a 4 GB flash drive for the Win7 installation (I used an old one)
- a 1 GB flash drive to use as a DOS boot drive when updating the BIOS
- HP USB Disk Format Tool
- Dell Mini10v Bios A04 (required to "roll back" your BIOS, probably the scariest part of all this
- NetbookInstaller 0.8.3 and NetbootMaker 0.8.3 (used to make MacOSX installer USB drive bootable on the Dell, and tweak installation settings on the Mac)
- WinToFlash (use to create a bootable USB Win7 installer)
- EasyBCD (Use this last on the Windows-side to configure dual-boot)

STEP 1 - Roll back BIOS from A06 to A04

This was the most nerve-wracking part, since if you mess up on a BIOS flash you can turn your computer into a doorstop. I used the "HP USB Disk Format Tool" to create a 1 GB bootable flash drive, and downloaded the DOS version of the Mini10V A04 BIOS to it. I renamed the file something easier to type than the default name, keeping the .exe extension of course. When starting up the netbook, hold down F2 to go into BIOS settings, make sure legacy USB support is enabled, and USB booting is supported. If you see an exclamation point beside the USB boot option, that means it is NOT enabled. I was not really familiar with BIOS changes, having just dabbled with this a little in the past, so this actually took me quite a while to figure out. After BIOS settings are like you need them, hold down F12 and choose to boot to the USB key. You should see a C: prompt, type the name of BIOS file you copied to the flash drive.

Since you are rolling back the BIOS, you have to use special "operators" to force the rollback installation. I found the following forum post which provided that syntax, which worked for me:
Downgrade your Mini 10v BIOS to A04 (Requires Windows)

For me this was: "bios.exe /forceit /forcetype" (without quotes)

After this my Dell Mini10v was ready to be partitioned and have Mac OS X installed.

STEP 2 - Partition hard drive and install Mac OS 10.6

To install anything on a netbook, of course, if you don't have an external CD/DVD drive (and I don't) you must use USB. On my Mac, I put the OS 10.6 Snow Leopard (SL) Installer in and ran the program Drive Utility. This is in Applications - Utilities and comes with every Mac now. I clicked the icon for the SL installer and clicked new image. I chose to save this on an external drive. Then the program created this "image" of the DVD. This is required so you can "restore" that image to a USB drive. Before creating the USB version you will need to SCAN it. Click on the name of the completed DVD image in Disk Utility, and from the from the top menu bar choose IMAGES - SCAN IMAGE FOR RESTORE.

After that finishes, you're ready to prepare your Mac OS X installation USB drive. I used a 8 GB flash drive. I think you need to have at least an 8 because the DVD takes up 5 GB of space. Put in the USB drive, and again using Drive Utility click on it. Click Partition, select 1 partition from the dropdown menu, click on options and choose GUID, keep the default format as Mac OS with journaling, and choose to apply the changes. Your Flash drive will format as Untitled 1.

Next click the RESTORE tab for the flash drive. Drag "Utility 1" to the destination field. Drag the image of the Mac OS 10.6 installation DVD (which you've already "scanned" for restore) to the SOURCE field. Then click RESTORE. This will take 20-30 min most likely.

After that is finished, you still need to run the NetbootMaker program to prep the flash drive so it will boot on your Dell Mini10. (I used version 0.8.3, by the time you read this there will likely be newer versions. Double click the program on your Mac, select your install USB drive you just restored, and click PREPARE BOOT DRIVE. This takes a minute or too. When you see the screen that says you're done, remove your USB drive and put it in your netbook.

Boot up your netbook using the USB drive you've just created using the Apple DVD and restore process, and NetbootMaker. Hold down the F12 key and choose to boot to the USB drive. Press a key when you see the startup screen, and choose the first option, Mac OS X installation. In my case I'd backed everything up that was on my hard drive that I wanted to keep, so I wiped everything out to start with fresh installations of OS X and Win7. Click to choose English. Before installing, however, at the top of the screen choose UTILITIES and select DISK UTILITY. Use Disk Utility to create your partitions as you want them. Click "partition" and click options, select GUID. I chose to create two partitions for my final installation: about 180 GB for the Mac side, only 40 GB for the Win7 side (I don't plan on using it much) and the rest I left as free space. In the future I hope to install Ubuntu so I'm leaving some space for it. The Mac side needs to be Mac OS journaled format, the Windows side can be FAT32 but I formatted it later as NTFS during the Win7 install. If you want to leave room for Ubuntu you can do it with just a few GB, but I left 10 GB free. Ubuntu likes a partition to use for swap space also, so I left some extra room for that later. This is certainly not required, you can allocate all your available drive space to the Mac and Windows partitions.

After you apply the desired partition settings and click apply, wait while Disk Utility makes the changes. All data on the drives will be lost, so again make sure you back up. Choose to QUIT disk utility, and this will return you to the Mac installer.

Select the customization options you want for the installer. I chose not to install any print drivers or extra languages, but went with X11, Rosetta and QT7. This installation will probably take about 30 min. When it finishes, restart and your computer should boot into Mac OS X from the hard drive. Go through the registration and setup procedures till you get to the desktop.

Next, restart AGAIN to the USB drive by holding down F12. Again click to use English, but don't install again, go up to the UTILITIES menu and choose to run the program NetbookBootMaker. The Usage Wiki for the program shows how to do this:
Usage - netbook-installer - How to use the NetbookInstaller Suite - Project Hosting on Google Code

I selected all options except "install old mirror friendly GMA kext" and "enable quiet boot." Not sure if this was right, but it's worked for me. Some instructions I read suggested that you startup in SAFE mode and run this program. This makes some system tweaks that are needed for the Mini10 hardware. It worked fine for me to run this off the USB installer instead of booting into safe mode. I found that easier.

Now your OS X installation is all setup and you're ready for Win7.

STEP 3 - Install Windows 7

I used the program WinToFlash (linked above) to create a bootable USB flash version of my Win7 installation ISO image. You can use a DVD to do this also. The program is very simple, wizard based, and will erase your flashdrive when copying the Win7 files and boot files. I used a 4 GB flash drive for this.

After preparing that flash drive, I booted my netbook up to that flash drive by holding down F12. Step through all the Win7 screens. I obtained a Win7 pre-candidate release code online from Microsoft, these are available free through 21 Oct 2009. The Win7 PC is no longer available for download from Microsoft but is readily available via a BitTorrent client.

After installing Win7 from the USB it rebooted and started up from the hard drive. I installed Symantec antivirus first, after the automatic security updates finished downloading and installing.

Now the Win7 side of things is finished.

4- Use EasyBCD to configure dual booting

I next downloaded EasyBCD (see link above or Google it) to configure the dual booting menu. This was pretty easy, you just click to add an entry (it will only have one to start with, for Windows) and choose to add Mac OS X as a standard x86 installation. That is really it. The only other thing I did was change the settings so the Mac OS was the default.

Then I restarted, and the bootloader menu came up letting me choose either Win7 or Mac OS X.

What a dream. I particularly love running Mac OS X on this Dell Mini10v. Throughout this entire process I got very frustrated and almost gave up many times, but I am glad I persisted. Some of the instructions I read told how you can make these configuration changes by taking out the hard drive and connecting it to a Mac, but I didn't want to do that if I could avoid it. Here is another tutorials I used which was very helpful.
Dell Mini 10v Running Leopard: Story Here

I did install the touchpad tweak mentioned in the above instructions as well. Not sure how much better that is than the default settings, but it seems good. Here is that direct link.

Good luck to you if you embark on this adventure. It's definitely worth it once you get everything installed and configured!

[soly]

Great post! THX! I'll try it as soon i got my mini!!

[hphovercraft]

I have tried about 6 different ways to do the dual boot. I did this exact same process last week. It worked great. I used EasyBCD to go back and forth between installations, and everything loaded fine. The only trick is that I had to re-patch the OSx isntall (10.6.1) with netbookinstaller, and after that, my mac OS wouldn't boot.

I can still get into Windows 7, but when I boot to Mac, I get a boot error:
File: \NST\nst_mac.mbr
Status: 0xc000000e
Info: The selected entry could not be loaded because the application is missing or corrupt.

If I boot to the chameleon bootloader on the patched OSX install USB drive, I can choose to boot to my OSX installation partition, and it will load, but there are problems. For one, I have no sound at all. Keep in mind that I had a working hackintosh install before trying the dual boot thing. It worked great. I'm just having a hard time getting this all working correctly.

Has anyone seen this error? Or has anyone had a successful dual boot, and then successfully repatched their install with netbookinstaller?

[Alcapowned]

That's the problem with using Easybcd as your bootloader - when you do a NBI it always corrupts the Mac option in the bootloader . See my guide for an alternative method that uses the Chameleon bootloader. Note that you should remove easy BCD before running NBM and doing steps 7-9 on my guide, otherwise after you have completed the process and you select your windows partition on chameleon, you will be greeted with a redundant easyBCD bootloader (with the broken mac choice) which you will not be able to remove.

http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/dell...ndows-7-a.html

Also - another person noted that they don't appear to have sound working on thier mac install after using my guide. I don't appear to have the same problem (and i tried it on 2 10vs), except that as on any install of NBM .8.3rc2 with 10.6.1, sound does not work after sleep. see the below thread for a solution to that.

http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/os-x...sleep-10v.html

Hope this helps!

[hphovercraft]

Originally Posted by Alcapowned

See my guide for an alternative method that uses the Chameleon bootloader.

Thanks Alcapowned. I actually tried your guide earlier. I've literally tried at least 6 or 7 different different dual boot scenarios. I liked the idea of just using chameleon for the boot loader, but after I went in and set the mac partion as active, my windows partition would no longer boot. I'd get a boot error very similar to the one I listed above, but from the windows boot system.

But maybe I used fdisk instead of diskpart like you mention in your guide. I don't know, I've tried it so many different ways that it makes my brain hurt. They all just kind of run together.

[hphovercraft]

Originally Posted by hphovercraft

Thanks Alcapowned. I actually tried your guide earlier. I've literally tried at least 6 or 7 different different dual boot scenarios. I liked the idea of just using chameleon for the boot loader, but after I went in and set the mac partion as active, my windows partition would no longer boot. I'd get a boot error very similar to the one I listed above, but from the windows boot system.

Ok, I take back what I said. Alcapowned, I think you've finally done it. I HAVE tried just about every way, but your guide holds the key. The part I was missing was using diskpart to fix the windows install and to set the partitions you need as active. This also could have helped me on many of my past failed attempts. Instead of starting all over with another method, I could have just used the last little bit of your guide and fixed my partitions. Anyone looking for a dual boot that works, try Alcapowned's guide. I would definitely recommend it over the EasyBCD method.

The only part that sucks is that every time you update your netbookinstaller files, you're going to have to repair the partitions. It's not that big of a deal, but you have to keep your windows installer files on a USB drive, and possibly tie up another drive with your Mac installer files. Anyway, bravo. I actually have a working dual-boot now. Sleep works, sound works, wireless on my Win7 works (that hasn't worked on past dualboot attempts).

[cruse86]

Yo thanks for this man

I have the same Dell mini and I was trying everything to make it dual boot OSX and Win 7 but this guide worked the best, and thanks for the links to the downloads

Originally Posted by frodo

Thanks to so many people for posting solutions, questions, and answers related to installing Mac OS X / Snow Leopard (SL) as well as Windows7 on a Dell Mini10v. In case this helps someone else, I thought I would post the highlights of my learning this past weekend when I spent somewhere around 15 hours messing around with different configuration options until I finally got everything working. On my Snow Leopard installation my sound works great (both playback and recording using Audacity,) the battery shows an accurate time remaining, and my sleep function even seems to work too! All of those were things I've read on other posts that DIDN'T work in some cases. So far I haven't found anything that DOESN'T work on my install of Mac OSX. I haven't spent as much time on the Win7 side, but there everything looks good too.

My basic procedures to get my Dell Mini10v dual booting SL and Win7 were:
1- Roll back BIOS from A06 to A04 (otherwise you get a kernel panic error when installing MacOS)
2- Partition hard drive and install Mac OS 10.6
3- Install Windows 7
4- Use EasyBCD to configure dual booting

I ended up doing this several times because of mistakes I made. The biggest one was trying to install Ubuntu Netbook Remix with its default settings. Its bootloader messed things up and I ended up starting over. I like this Ubuntu distribution and at some point hope to get Ubuntu also running on my Mini10v, but for now I'm happy with SL and Win7. I have heard the beta Ubuntu 9.10 is really fast on Netbooks.

The sites and resources I used to get my installation working were:
- MacOS 10.6 SL installation DVD
- MacBook Pro running MacOS 10.6.1
- Win7 Installation ISO image
- WindowsXP running via Parallels on my Mac (needed to create Windows bootable USB drives)
- Disk Utility on the MB Pro
- an 8 GB flash drive for the MacOS installation (bought at Radio Shack for $25)
- a 4 GB flash drive for the Win7 installation (I used an old one)
- a 1 GB flash drive to use as a DOS boot drive when updating the BIOS
- HP USB Disk Format Tool
- Dell Mini10v Bios A04 (required to "roll back" your BIOS, probably the scariest part of all this
- NetbookInstaller 0.8.3 and NetbootMaker 0.8.3 (used to make MacOSX installer USB drive bootable on the Dell, and tweak installation settings on the Mac)
- WinToFlash (use to create a bootable USB Win7 installer)
- EasyBCD (Use this last on the Windows-side to configure dual-boot)

STEP 1 - Roll back BIOS from A06 to A04

This was the most nerve-wracking part, since if you mess up on a BIOS flash you can turn your computer into a doorstop. I used the "HP USB Disk Format Tool" to create a 1 GB bootable flash drive, and downloaded the DOS version of the Mini10V A04 BIOS to it. I renamed the file something easier to type than the default name, keeping the .exe extension of course. When starting up the netbook, hold down F2 to go into BIOS settings, make sure legacy USB support is enabled, and USB booting is supported. If you see an exclamation point beside the USB boot option, that means it is NOT enabled. I was not really familiar with BIOS changes, having just dabbled with this a little in the past, so this actually took me quite a while to figure out. After BIOS settings are like you need them, hold down F12 and choose to boot to the USB key. You should see a C: prompt, type the name of BIOS file you copied to the flash drive.

Since you are rolling back the BIOS, you have to use special "operators" to force the rollback installation. I found the following forum post which provided that syntax, which worked for me:
Downgrade your Mini 10v BIOS to A04 (Requires Windows)

For me this was: "bios.exe /forceit /forcetype" (without quotes)

After this my Dell Mini10v was ready to be partitioned and have Mac OS X installed.

STEP 2 - Partition hard drive and install Mac OS 10.6

To install anything on a netbook, of course, if you don't have an external CD/DVD drive (and I don't) you must use USB. On my Mac, I put the OS 10.6 Snow Leopard (SL) Installer in and ran the program Drive Utility. This is in Applications - Utilities and comes with every Mac now. I clicked the icon for the SL installer and clicked new image. I chose to save this on an external drive. Then the program created this "image" of the DVD. This is required so you can "restore" that image to a USB drive. Before creating the USB version you will need to SCAN it. Click on the name of the completed DVD image in Disk Utility, and from the from the top menu bar choose IMAGES - SCAN IMAGE FOR RESTORE.

After that finishes, you're ready to prepare your Mac OS X installation USB drive. I used a 8 GB flash drive. I think you need to have at least an 8 because the DVD takes up 5 GB of space. Put in the USB drive, and again using Drive Utility click on it. Click Partition, select 1 partition from the dropdown menu, click on options and choose GUID, keep the default format as Mac OS with journaling, and choose to apply the changes. Your Flash drive will format as Untitled 1.

Next click the RESTORE tab for the flash drive. Drag "Utility 1" to the destination field. Drag the image of the Mac OS 10.6 installation DVD (which you've already "scanned" for restore) to the SOURCE field. Then click RESTORE. This will take 20-30 min most likely.

After that is finished, you still need to run the NetbootMaker program to prep the flash drive so it will boot on your Dell Mini10. (I used version 0.8.3, by the time you read this there will likely be newer versions. Double click the program on your Mac, select your install USB drive you just restored, and click PREPARE BOOT DRIVE. This takes a minute or too. When you see the screen that says you're done, remove your USB drive and put it in your netbook.

Boot up your netbook using the USB drive you've just created using the Apple DVD and restore process, and NetbootMaker. Hold down the F12 key and choose to boot to the USB drive. Press a key when you see the startup screen, and choose the first option, Mac OS X installation. In my case I'd backed everything up that was on my hard drive that I wanted to keep, so I wiped everything out to start with fresh installations of OS X and Win7. Click to choose English. Before installing, however, at the top of the screen choose UTILITIES and select DISK UTILITY. Use Disk Utility to create your partitions as you want them. Click "partition" and click options, select GUID. I chose to create two partitions for my final installation: about 180 GB for the Mac side, only 40 GB for the Win7 side (I don't plan on using it much) and the rest I left as free space. In the future I hope to install Ubuntu so I'm leaving some space for it. The Mac side needs to be Mac OS journaled format, the Windows side can be FAT32 but I formatted it later as NTFS during the Win7 install. If you want to leave room for Ubuntu you can do it with just a few GB, but I left 10 GB free. Ubuntu likes a partition to use for swap space also, so I left some extra room for that later. This is certainly not required, you can allocate all your available drive space to the Mac and Windows partitions.

After you apply the desired partition settings and click apply, wait while Disk Utility makes the changes. All data on the drives will be lost, so again make sure you back up. Choose to QUIT disk utility, and this will return you to the Mac installer.

Select the customization options you want for the installer. I chose not to install any print drivers or extra languages, but went with X11, Rosetta and QT7. This installation will probably take about 30 min. When it finishes, restart and your computer should boot into Mac OS X from the hard drive. Go through the registration and setup procedures till you get to the desktop.

Next, restart AGAIN to the USB drive by holding down F12. Again click to use English, but don't install again, go up to the UTILITIES menu and choose to run the program NetbookBootMaker. The Usage Wiki for the program shows how to do this:
Usage - netbook-installer - How to use the NetbookInstaller Suite - Project Hosting on Google Frogger

I selected all options except "install old mirror friendly GMA kext" and "enable quiet boot." Not sure if this was right, but it's worked for me. Some instructions I read suggested that you startup in SAFE mode and run this program. This makes some system tweaks that are needed for the Mini10 hardware. It worked fine for me to run this off the USB installer instead of booting into safe mode. I found that easier.

Now your OS X installation is all setup and you're ready for Win7.

STEP 3 - Install Windows 7

I used the program WinToFlash (linked above) to create a bootable USB flash version of my Win7 installation ISO image. You can use a DVD to do this also. The program is very simple, wizard based, and will erase your flashdrive when copying the Win7 files and boot files. I used a 4 GB flash drive for this.

After preparing that flash drive, I booted my netbook up to that flash drive by holding down F12. Step through all the Win7 screens. I obtained a Win7 pre-candidate release code online from Microsoft, these are available free through 21 Oct 2009. The Win7 PC is no longer available for download from Microsoft but is readily available via a BitTorrent client.

After installing Win7 from the USB it rebooted and started up from the hard drive. I installed Symantec antivirus first, after the automatic security updates finished downloading and installing.

Now the Win7 side of things is finished.

4- Use EasyBCD to configure dual booting

I next downloaded EasyBCD (see link above or Google it) to configure the dual booting menu. This was pretty easy, you just click to add an entry (it will only have one to start with, for Windows) and choose to add Mac OS X as a standard x86 installation. That is really it. The only other thing I did was change the settings so the Mac OS was the default.

Then I restarted, and the bootloader menu came up letting me choose either Win7 or Mac OS X.

What a dream. I particularly love running Mac OS X on this Dell Mini10v. Throughout this entire process I got very frustrated and almost gave up many times, but I am glad I persisted. Some of the instructions I read told how you can make these configuration changes by taking out the hard drive and connecting it to a Mac, but I didn't want to do that if I could avoid it. Here is another tutorials I used which was very helpful.
Dell Mini 10v Running Leopard: Story Here

I did install the touchpad tweak mentioned in the above instructions as well. Not sure how much better that is than the default settings, but it seems good. Here is that direct link.

Good luck to you if you embark on this adventure. It's definitely worth it once you get everything installed and configured!

[mini_monkey]

I love my mini 9 and need Windows for a number of things, but I'm finally breaking down and getting a Mac also. I'd like to have a dual boot Win 7/Snow Leopard for my Mini 9, but reading through this and other posts, it sounds like its out of my league.

If anyone has a Norton Ghost image of a Win 7/Snow Leopard drive that they could share (or other solution like I send you an SSD that you clone your drive onto) I would be hugely grateful.

Win 7/Snow Leopard sounds great, I'd love to use it.