This tutorial will take a Dell Mini 10 (not Mini10v!) to Mac OS X 10.6.2. This tutorial assumes that you have access to a Mac with OS X 10.6.x and you are comfortable running commands in a terminal window. You will need an external USB Hard Drive, a USB mouse and a retail copy of a Snow Leopard Install DVD.

v1.2 (12/22/09)



Phase 1: Prepare an External USB Hard Drive on your Mac

1. Download this zip file (v1.1) and expand it on your Desktop
2. Download MacOSXUpd10.6.1.dmg and MacOSXUpd10.6.2.dmg from Apple
3. Using Disk Utility, format an External USB Hard Drive into 1 partition called "OSXInstall". Use Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and click Options to select GUID.
4. Using the Restore tab in Disk Utility, restore the "Mac OS X Install DVD" volume onto the new partition called "OSXInstall". Uncheck the "Erase destination" checkbox. Click Restore. Expect this to take 20-30 minutes.
5. When that is finished, copy MacOSXUpd10.6.1.dmg and MacOSXUpd10.6.2.dmg to OSXInstall.
6. Find the disk identifier of your USB drive. Select the USB drive in Disk Utility and choose Get Info (or run "diskutil list" in terminal). In a terminal window , run the following 2 commands, replacing "diskX" with your disk identifier:

cd ~/Desktop/dw-howto-files/scripts/
sudo sh 01-prepare-install.sh diskX

Phase 2: Install OS X 10.6.0 on your Mini10

1. Eject the External Hard Drive and plug it into your Mini10. Make sure your external USB mouse is plugged in at this time.
2. Hit F2 to enter the Bios Setup. Make sure the time is set to match your Mac's system clock. In the advanced tab, make sure "USB Wake Support" is set to Disabled. Hit F10 to save and exit.
3. At the logo screen press F12 and select USB Storage as the startup device. At the chameleon screen, select the default drive "OSXInstall" and hit enter to continue the boot process. The boot may take a few minutes.
4. After you select a language, go to Disk Utility and format your internal hard drive. Create one partition with the name MiniHD and a format of Mac OS Extended (Journaled). click Options to select GUID. Click apply.
5. After the format is done, quit Disk Utility and install Mac OS X to your internal hard drive named MiniHD. Customize as needed. The install took about 30 minutes for me.
6. When the computer restarts after reboot, do not let it boot to the internal hard drive yet. At the logo screen press F12 and select USB Storage as the startup device once again. You will have a choice of boot drives now. Choose OSXInstall again.
   Should the system not restart Automatically, hit the power button
7. Note: if you cannot boot from the OSXInstall a second time, try booting in safe mode. To do this, select OSXInstall at the chameleon boot screen and type -x<return>. This boots in safe mode and forces kernel extensions to reload.
8. After booting from OSXInstall a second time, choose your language and then select Terminal from the Utilities menu. Do the following command in the new terminal window:

cd /dw-howto-files/scripts/
sh 02-prepare-mini-hd.sh disk0

1. Quit terminal. Quit the installer. Restart and let your Mini10 boot from the internal hard drive.
   again, Should the system not restart Automatically, hit the power button
2. Upon restart, if your USB Hard Drive is still plugged in, you will see 2 options to boot from. Choose MiniHD (it should now be the default option). This first boot takes 3-4 minutes for me.
3. Go through the Mac OS X setup, filling in values as you please. Note that at this time you do not have wireless networking support so you may skip the internet setup options.
4. run DSDT Patcher GUI in /dw-howto-files/DSDTPatcherGUI_1.0 from the OSXInstall-disk. Check "Apply DDSDT Patch To" and select MiniHD. Click the Run DDST Patcher button.

Phase 3: Upgrade your Mini to OS X 10.6.2

1. First, upgrade to OS X 10.6.1 - simply install the MacOSXUpd10.6.1.dmg from your OSXInstall USB drive. Upon completion, restart and boot from the internal hard drive MiniHD again. Keep the USB drive mounted.
2. After restart, upgrade to OS X 10.6.2 in the same way. Install the MacOSXUpd10.6.2.dmg from your OSXInstall USB drive. Let the installer finish, but do not restart. Leave the installer application open and complete the next steps.
3. With the OSXInstall volume still mounted, run these files in Terminal. Note that you will need to hit enter 3 times for the first part of the script:

cd /Volumes/OSXInstall/dw-howto-files/scripts/
sudo sh 03-postinstall-10.6.2-tweaks.sh

1. Now go back to the installer application and click restart. Let the computer boot from the internal hard drive again. You may see a kernel panic (You need to restart your computer.") before you get back to the installer application. If this happens, just reboot manually. The computer may reboot on its own 2 times if this happens.
2. Note: some people have not had success with the patched kernel included in this howto. If the computer will not reboot, try copying the mach_kernel found here to the root directory of your internal HD.
3. The last step is to apply the LAN drivers. Just run the RTGNICv2.0.3.pkg installer package in /dw-howto-files/RTGMac_v2.0.3/ on OSXInstall.

You should now have Mac OS X 10.6.2 with trackpad, sound, wireless, and LAN running on your Dell Mini 10. If it works, congratulations! Please post your success in this forum. If it doesn't work, I suggest you try again. Many of the steps have details that are easy to miss. If it still doesn't work after a second or third try, please post your failures in the original thread as well.

Thanks to:
darylzero (for the kickoff and extensive work!)
meklort (for the efforts on patching, and explaining code to newb's like me!)
Deweller (for writing this tutorial)
is44c (for patching netbook bootmaker)
adamtj09 (for his help in testing)
mrkcee (for his testing and feedback!)
Everyone I forgot, that helped creating this possibility or spent the hours in testing the different options!
and ofcourse the mydellmini forum crew!

This How-To is licensed

[theunnamed]

Don't we have a chance to install OS X, to Mini 10 without a Mac.. I dont have any chance to find a mac, also hackintosh.. I just have a mini 10 and inspiron 6400 (not compatible for hackintosh)

[joeltje]

I don't have any windoze computers in my house, so can't help there. Maybe someone who understand that issue can assist? I'll gladly add it to the how-to...

[qbnkid98]

question, do you mean Mini 10v not mini 10. i had a mini 10 and couldn't hack due to incompatible graphics card. just asking thanks. Everywhere i read it says 10v is the one to hack.

[WolfKeeper]

Originally Posted by qbnkid98

question, do you mean Mini 10v not mini 10. i had a mini 10 and couldn't hack due to incompatible graphics card. just asking thanks. Everywhere i read it says 10v is the one to hack.

He means the 10, as in Inspiron 1010. It's somewhat compatible now.

[Jimimidi]

Thanks for the hard work! After a failed attempt last night, I was able to get this all working. Had to use the alternate mach_kernel from the Russian, but all seems to work.
GREAT GOING. Now, how do we get around the crappy Video driver?

[carriesn]

UGH. started phase 2 of the guide but the external HD wont load- ebios read error device timeout 0 shows up after a few minutes of the chameleon logo. When in Windows XP the HD doesnt show up either. Its an Ultra Mini Portable Drive (enclosure) and googling it shows that there isn't a driver required for Win XP.

Any ideas?

Ive a WD 1TB drive but Im loath to reformat it as its my main backup drive for my imac.

Thanks!

EDITED for update

Went ahead and used my WD drive and it worked. Had some weirdness with processes (.exe not recognizing the usb port and all that) and the install seemed to freeze at 19 minutes left. I left it alone last night and this morning, moved the external drive usb cable to the other usb port and it started up fine. Forgot to load the OS X update dmg files on the drive tho- doing that now and then starting the update process!

One thing though- I wish I had thought ahead and left the small partition (Dell's Recovery OS partition) on the HD just in case I needed the laptop serviced and sent it in- I dont think the Dell folks would take seeing a Mac OS on it very well. Is it even possible to leave that small partition? If so, maybe you should mention it in your guide.

[theunnamed]

I did exactly what you said in the phase 1, I got an error after the "sudo sh 01-prepare-install.sh diskX" command,

successfully unmounted...
successfully unmounted...
.
.
.
unable to mount volume disk1, please manually mount volume disk1....

Altough I get this error I try to boot it up, but gives me the error:


boot0 : GPT
boot0 : testing
boot0 : testing
boot1 : error

Note: Using Hackintosh (iAtkos v7)

What is the problem ?

[midnite]

I just wanted to report that I got this to work on my Dell Mini 10, however, it wasn't without some headaches along the way.

I did not have an existing Mac to setup my USB drive, so I first had to get OSX working in VMWare so I could do my work in there. I had Leopard to setup my USB. I took about 3 hours to Restore the install DVD to the USB stick.

I, as the poster above, then got the errors when running the 01 script. The first problem was that xattr on Leopard didn't support the -r command line argument. But the bigger problem was that the mount/unmount commands were not working as the script wanted them to. What I ended up doing is reading through the script and executing the commands by hand until I got it all. This is probably the part that will trip up most.

After getting my USB stick setup, everything went smoothly as the instructions say, until the end after the 10.6.2 update when I could no longer boot with the kernel. I downloaded the patched kernel listed, but struggled to find a way to get it to my MiniHD drive (again, I don't have a Mac, just Windows). I ended up having to download and install the trial of TransMac, and copying the mach_kernel from the zip onto my USB "OSXInstall" drive. After booting back into install again (via "OSXInstall" using -x to go safe mode), I brought up a terminal and ran the following commands (from memory):

1) cd /Volumes/MiniHD/
2) mv mach_kernel mach_kernel_1062
3) cp /Volumes/OSXInstall/PatchedKernel/mach_kernel /Volumes/MiniHD/
4) chown 0:0 mach_kernel
5) reboot

After that, I installed the network driver and it has been golden since!

(Thank you so much for posting this!)

[Shenanigans]

I got everything to work but it took a few tries.

My setup:
Mac Pro Quad 2.8GHz running 10.6.2 fully updated as of this post.
Mini 10 with BIOS A5
WD MyBook External USB Enclosure w/ 750GB Caviar Blue HD

The first time I followed the instructions on this site I ran into an issue after installing 10.6.2. I would not boot up because I ran into the common wake up/ timing issue a lot of people have.

The second time around I followed the steps above to the word until I got to the part where I installed 10.6.0. When everything was golden getting 10.6.0 loaded, I plugged my external inclosure back into my original Mac and downloaded the patched kernel here and copied it over the original file found in the external HD. I then followed the steps above exactly as described and everything works fine.

My problem is this though. OS X on this machine does not run very well due to the difference with the graphic chipset. Normal things function OK but I cannot get any video HD or SD to playback without significant frame loss. I love OS X but this machine as is with this workaround is no good in my opinion right now. I think once there is some native support for the 500 graphic chipset, OS X will work great. Until then, I'd pass.