My Dell Mini Forum

**Update** Many thanks to all who made suggestions to improve this guide. I have made some small changes to the instructions in an attempt to incorporate them. Please note that I have NOT tested this with NBM 0.8.3 RC4 (or with RC3 for that matter) so my changes are based solely on other peoples comments - keep em coming!


Right, so I’ve tried numerous ways of getting a functional dual boot of windows 7 and Snow Leopard over the last couple of weeks, all to very little avail until I stumbled across gptsync. Meklort has just added it into the NBM .8.3 rc2 install routine, to make dual booting a lot easier. After all my trials and tribulations, I decided to make an up-to-date, definitive guide to dual booting. All of the steps are things that I have picked up from guides on this site, so any thanks go to the authors of those previous posts. I just thought I’d pull them all together for simplicity....

You can follow this guide if you are performing a fresh install, or if you already have OSX installed on your HDD. i did this on a 10v, but it should also work on a mini9 if you have a big enough SSD.

Things I used:

1x 8GB usb drive with SL retail and nbm 0.8.3 rc2 or higher. (Instructions here)
1x 4GB usb drive with windows 7 installer. (Instructions here)

1. check bios settings (10v users) - make sure your bios is version ao4 and legacy usb is enabled. If not, follow the guide here. plug in the osx usb key and turn on the mini. Press f12 to boot from usb, and wait until the mac installer starts.

2. In the utilities menu open disk utility. Select the hard drive (not the existing partitions but the hard drive itself), and click on the partition tab.
a) If you already have OSX installed, click the “+� button at the bottom of the little window displaying the partitions and specify the size you would like. Format the partition in MSDOS-FAT format.
b) If you are doing a fresh install, you want a GUID partition table with 2 partitions. The first needs to be in the hfs+ format – this is your mac partition. it can be any size you like as long as there’s enough for OSX - typically you need at least 10gb. I chose 110gb). The second partition (for windows) needs to be in the FAT format and again can be any size you like above around 10gb - I chose 50. Note: When you name the FAT partition make sure the name is not longer than 8 or so characters. I used 'windows' as the name - you can change it later....

3. Quit disk utility and continue the mac installation (use the customize button to remove any unwanted features, saving space and speeding up the installation – handy if like me you're an impatient git).

4. Once the installation is complete it will prompt you to restart. Do not restart into OSX – turn it off when it is about to cycle, and put in your windows stick. boot into the 7 installation environment.

5. Select language and click install. You should get to a disk utility window. Select the windows FAT partition that you created (look at the sizes if you're unsure), click advanced and then click format (it will format the drive in the NTFS format). You should now be able to click next to install windows.

6. Allow windows to install, it’ll ask you a few things and restart a number of times. Once it’s finished your computer will boot automatically to windows as if it's the only OS installed. To get the chameleon bootloader working with windows 7 do the following:

7. Boot from the OSX USB drive and run Netbookinstaller (in the utilities menu). Make sure you have the chameleon bootloader checked, and that quiet boot is disabled. Click install. Once the install is finished, OSX will now be the active boot, But your windows boot sector will be corrupted
(if you select it on chameleon it will say 'Windows 7 0xc000000e boot error').

8. To correct this, shutdown, insert your windows usb key and boot from it. If you tried to repair the boot sector now, the windows installer would not succeed, because when it looks for the boot sector to repair, it assumes that the active partition will be the windows partition and looks there. But in the last step NBI set your mac partition as active. To get it to fix the windows boot sector we need to temporarily set the windows partition as active:
When you get to the language choice, press Shift+fn+f10 to bring up the command prompt.

NBM 0.8.3 RC3 and higher creates partitions in a different way - at this point follow these commands to identify which of your partitions is which (look at the size of each partition):

Diskpart [enter]
Select disk 0 [enter]
list partition [enter]

You should get a list of all the partitions on the drive. make note of the following partition numbers:
#EFI (Mac boot partition)
#HFS+ (Mac Install)
#NTFS (windows Install)
Where you see '#....' in the commands below, replace them with the corresponding partition number for your system (for example my NTFS partition is partition 3, so below i would write 'select partition 3')


Type the following:
Diskpart [enter]
Select disk 0 [enter]
Select partition #NTFS [enter]
Active [enter]
It should tell you that partition #NTFS is now active.

9. Alt+Tab to the install window and click the option to repair windows install. It should now find the windows install and repair the boot sector (and not mess up your chameleon install in the process).

10. Finally, when it restarts, boot to the windows installer one last time. You need to set the active disk to your mac install with the chameleon bootloader - Press Shift+fn+f10 and bring up the command prompt. Type the following:
Diskpart [enter]
Select disk 0 [enter]
Select partition #EFI [enter]
Active [enter]

Both installs should now work fine again!