[appleguru]

The current latest bios for the mini 9 is A05. The current latest bios for the Vostro A90 is A04. They are equal in terms of updates, etc.

Use this guide to upgrade your Dell Mini 9 Or Vostro A90 running Mac OS X to the latest Bios from Dell.

1) If you have a mini 9...

Click here to read the entire tutorial

[johannlo]

Also, they may have fixed some bugs in the memory controller, as the same 2GB stick of ram that before would fail in a memtest now passes flawlessly (This could also be due to regenerating the dsdt.aml file, I'm still doing some tests)

Wait: to upgrade your RAM to a 2Gb stick, you need to delete dsdt.aml and run DellEFI again???? Can someone confirm?

I've got 2Gigs on the way for my mini9 hackintosh

[MiniFan]

Quick side note:

Make sure your USB drive is partitioned with either GUID or Master Boot Record schemes.

Apple Partition Map will not work (obscure; yes. But some of us have old USB flash drives... ops: ).

[appleguru]

Originally Posted by MiniFan

Quick side note:

Make sure your USB drive is partitioned with either GUID or Master Boot Record schemes.

Apple Partition Map will not work (obscure; yes. But some of us have old USB flash drives... ops: ).

Makes no difference, the dd command wipes out the partition map when it writes the image to the drive (the image uses MBR)

Also, guide updated with a new FreeDOS image that will fit on any flash drive and has a script that runs the flasher on boot. Thanks meklort!

[appleguru]

Originally Posted by tinaliz

disk1

Not sure what to do...

if you have iChat and want to try screen sharing I'd be happy to take a look My sn is iwant2bskiing

[appleguru]

Originally Posted by johannlo

Wait: to upgrade your RAM to a 2Gb stick, you need to delete dsdt.aml and run DellEFI again???? Can someone confirm?

I've got 2Gigs on the way for my mini9 hackintosh

To be honest I'm not sure, checking with meklort... It certainly cant hurt though...

But my memory errors went away after the a05 update, so it was either the bios or the dsdt.aml file

[appleguru]

Originally Posted by meklort

Now that I think about it, It may. I am just guessing, but this is my what I'm thinking:
The dsdt file defines (system) memory locations to store various varuable. If you upgrade your ram, the bios may change those memmory locations. Since the dsdt file is only generated once and not patched at each boot, it'll have the old location. This could cause stability issues in os x.
So yes, it would be best to delete the dsdt file before you change your ram.

^^ From a PM with meklort... I was getting errors in memtest after I did a 2GB upgrade (I originally generated the custom dsdt.aml file with 1GB ram)... After upgrading to a05, I regenerated the dsdt file, and the memory errors went away (and os x has been a lot more stable!).

I wasn't sure if it was a05 or the dsdt file (or some combination) that did the trick, but that the dsdt file statically defines memory locations to store information is solid enough evidence for me! Still waiting for someone with a04 to anecdotally confirm, but for now:

WHEN YOU UPGRADE YOUR RAM, REGENERATE YOUR DSDT.AML FILE!

[davidww1]

Like tinaliz, I had repeated failures in writing the flasher.img material to my USB drive, despite carefully checking the contents of the command (one failure was traceable to mis-identifying the USB drive - I had highlighted the drive's name in Disk Utility, which gave the description "disk1s1" rather than its type identifier, which properly returned "disk1"). After that was sorted out and despite careful checking of the entered command, I still experienced the errors reported by tinaliz. Everything came together, though, after I - accidentally - did a cold boot (not a restart), reopened the Terminal and entered the command with the correct drive identification. At that point, we just sailed through.

Running DellEFI was a bit different from the description in the first post; when my first post-upgrade run of memtest ended in an address failure, those differences prompted me to go back and run DellEFI again (when I got results closer to those described in the instructions). As I write, memtest is now in the last stages of its third successful pass, so I'm reasonably confident that my repeated inability to get decent memtest results with a 2GB stick are now history.

Thank you to appleguru and all those who helped him make this happen.

David

[appleguru]

Originally Posted by davidww1

Running DellEFI was a bit different from the description in the first post

Just curious, what sort of differences were you seeing?

[davidww1]

Appleguru,

I'm sorry, I should have taken screen shots but I was focussed on the task at hand, and I can't remember now with any accuracy. What I saw however, was sufficiently different from your description that when memtest failed, my first reaction was to re-run DellEFI.

My current Crucial RAM passed two sessions of three passes of memtest, so I'm confident that it's as good as it gets.

David

[TALA]

I just received my Dell mini 9 yesterday--ordered 3 weeks ago--How do I check what BIOS it comes with--should it not be A05 already.

TALA