[nohlberg]

Hi!
I just installed OS X on my Dell Mini 9 this weekend. Beautiful machine!
I thought that I should update the memory to 2GB from 1GB, and that is when the trouble started.
The machine started allright, I ran the dellefi, did the usual updates using DELLEfi1.2a5 and everything worked nicely, until I put the machine to sleep. Now the machine hung, and I had to reboot. From that point on the machine was unstable, frequently hanging after around 5 minutes, reboots were really slow, if they work at all, and when I try to update dsdt.aml again, it sometimes says that it could not be deleted.

Now I see that some of the issues that I am having are the same that others has had before, and the advice is generally to delete the dsdt.aml, rerun DELLEfi, reboot and then reboot again. And I have tried just that, many, many times, but the problem does not seem to go away anyhow.

The only time the machine works similary to how it worked before the problems is when I have just deleted the dsdt.aml file and rebooted, but not created a new one using DELLEfi.

After running the DellEFI successfully, and rebooting, the machine only gets to the spinning wheel before turning itself of. The second time the reboot works, but slowly and not at all in the speed it had before the memory upgrade.
Yes, the SO-DIMM might be broken, but that seems slighty unlikely in my experience.

Do anyone have any advice on what I should try next?
I do love the machine, so any help would be appreciated!

[mechdrew]

Let's rerun through the steps, since according to your post you did some things out of order.

1) Run DellEFI, select the option to delete the dsdt.aml file, click Install, and reboot (or shutdown).
2) If you have the 1 GB stick currently installed, install the 2 GB stick now.
3) Boot back into Mac OS X, run DellEFI, generate a new dsdt.aml file, reboot.

If that doesn't work, do you have Bluetooth?

[nohlberg]

Hi and thanks for your answer.
I do not have bluetooth.
I currently have the 2GB stick installed. This is the last procedure tested.

1) I have booted into the system, deleted the dsdt.aml file using terminal (can't seem to find the option to do it in dellefi, so used "sudo rm -rf /dsdtaml)

2) As the DellEFI-software then cannot generate a dsdt.aml-file, I reboot. The reboot takes a fairly long time (much longer than "normal", perhaps 3 minutes).

3) Reinstall by using the first four options in the "custom installation" mode. Cannot write the dsdt.aml-file, and reboot required.

4. Upon rebooting, as soon as the spinning wheel appears, the machine turns itself off.

5. I start the machine again, and try to create dsdt.aml file, but get the error 1, could not create dsdt.aml-file.

6. I try multiple times to reboot, and to get the machine to create a dsdt.aml-file, but am currently stuck in step 5, and it does not matter if I delete the dsdt.aml-file using terminal, I still can't generate a new one.


One general problem might be that I get a warning that I "appear to not be running this software on a dell mini 9" when I run the dellefi-software? This has been the same all the time, however.

[nohlberg]

An update!
I removed the old 2GB stick, and booted using the old 1GB. I was able to run DellEFI, and generate a new dsdt.aml-file. I then rebooted, installed the new 2GB stick, ran the delldfi, removed the old file, rebooted, generated a new file, rebooted and now things seem to be working as before, at least. Will have to test-drive a bit tomorrow and see if things work as the should. Knock on wood

The strange thing is that I did all these things before, when installing the new memory the first time. Wierd.
One small suggestion in for the DellEFI-developers would be to always include the function "delete dsdt.aml-file", as I have only been able to select it once, and had to delete it using terminal instead (probably the source of my problems?).

I am still slightly perplexed about the warning I get about not running this software on a dell...

[fatmac]

I get that warning every I run DellEFI1.2a5. I just ignore it, I think it's bogus.

[ian]

Originally Posted by fatmac

I get that warning every I run DellEFI1.2a5. I just ignore it, I think it's bogus.

I remember the discussion about adding this check to DellEFI, but I can't remember the details (and I can't remember enough to even Google for it). My recollection was that this was added after someone trashed his real Mac by accidentally running DellEFI on it. The check looks for some information about the hardware and uses that to perform the check. I'm guessing that some machines use slightly different hardware and the check wrongly shows up as "not a Mini 9".

[agianino]

I have done installs on at least 10 mini's and it always says it's not a mini 9... (That's because mine is a "MAC" mini 9 now :-)"

[nohlberg]

The problem seems to be related to the 2GB memory, but not because it is faulty, but because DellEFI does not seem to work properly with the 2GB stick.
Typically, if there is any trouble, and I try to generate a new dsdt.aml with the 2GB stick in, it will fail, and I will be stuck in an endless loop of reboots, retries and frustration. If, however, I put in the 1GB stick, it is a rather quick and painfree process demanding just a couple of reboots.
But in actual use, the 2GB memory seems to work just fine, so it seems, to me, to be a bug in the software. Does anyone else experience this?

Anyhow, the machine is working fine (now) and once again - thank you all for the help!

[nohlberg]

This seems like a neverending story... The 2GB memorystick simply refuses to work nicely, so the computer is notably quicker with 1GB than with two, and running dellefi just does not work with the 2GB memory.

Will try to move one of the memory modules I have from my iMac to the dell and see if that works better, and run some kind of memory test later on.

Most of all, I will test to see if the install is stable on the stock Dellsupplied memory module.

[oomingmak]

Hi to all,

I am planning to upgrade to 2 GO and I've got a question :

Do you always have to re-install DellEFI after the upgrade or does it depend on the memory stick and brand you use ?

Thank you.