My MacBook Wind

[caption id="attachment_342" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="image borrowed from gadgeteer"][/caption]

After numerous attempts at installing OS X Leopard on my HP Mini 1000 which turned out to be futile all of them; I've finally decided to give in and just do things the "old school" way. That is, I finally downloaded iDeneb v1.3 as instructed by how-to guides published over the net.

At first, I thought I'd go torrent the .iso file but the status message that Vuze, my torrent client, was disheartening me - 2 weeks to download a 4 gb or something file? Given my EQ level, I could not possibly wait that long. So I went the other way and proceeded with hunting down the 36 bits and pieces of iDeneb v1.3 on a popular file sharing site.

All in all the process took me 3 days to complete and that's not some 24-nonstop thing, mind you. Anyhow, with the downloading done and all 36 .rar files sitting in my Download folder - yes, I used my MacBook Wind to get the files off of the net - my next step was to put them all back into a single .iso that I intended to restore on my old 20 gb external hard drive. How do I do it exactly? I got RAR Expander which did the job just fabulously for me.

Now that an iDeneb v1.3 10.5.iso file was staring invitingly at me from my Documents folder, these were what I did next:

1) Mount the .iso file for iDeneb and plug in my external hard drive

2) Launch Disk Utility and partition my external HDD using options > GUID with

Mac OS Extendend (journaled) as format.

3) In the Restore tab, choose iDeneb as the file to restore and my external HDD as drive to restore to. This will take about 15 minutes or so depending on your hard drive's speed.

This was the point I got too excited so I went ahead of myself again and tried to boot the HP Mini with the external HDD with iDeneb restored in it.

Wrong move!

The next steps are important in order to boot from the restored iDeneb HDD

4) With the restored iDeneb HDD plugged in, launch Uinstaller

5) Set drive to the restored iDeneb HDD and check option "Install EFI"

6) Click on the Install button and wait until the process completes.

This should give (at last) a bootable iDeneb installer in a hard drive.

Follow the instructions found at myhpmini.com for the actual installation of OS X Leopard on the HP Mini 1000 and all should be set.

Coming soon MacBook Mini ^^

edit: MacBook Mini blog is now up

It's been a long while since I last updated this site - been busy in the "beauty department" hence the 1 month hiatus in the "nerd land" - but I'm back.

Remember that " Try and try until you burn out" post? Well this entry's got plenty to do with that topic. I'd been attempting to install OS X on my HP Mini 1000 by going with the bootable usb, or in my case, bootable external hard drive. I'd spent many a sleepless night trying every trick under my sleeve to get past that nasty "Mac framework successfully initialized" blah blah but to no avail.

I thought maybe I was just unlucky that way or I just had to get myself a Retail OS X Leopard DVD installer or iDeneb v1.3 like what everyone on the forums were doing. And so I got a Retail OS X Leopard DVD - there was a Tiger mac that needed to be upgraded to Leopard anyway so I thought I'd use the DVD myself for this little experiment.

I began trudging on, only to find myself bumping head first on to a wall - a very hard wall at that. My DVD drive flashed me I/O errors after 35 minutes into the project. Argghhh!!

I was stuck with the old iDeneb image I had stored in my Wind's hard drive. I read through Res' instructions from insanelymac and lo and behold; I found out where I'd tripping and didn't know I was even tripping before.

It turned out I always went directly to installing the HP mini plugin in Universal Installer, skipping OS X essentials plugin.



This time, I made sure I went through the OS X essentials plugin step of the how-to and low and behold: it booted.

Now my main problem is that aside from the keyboard, which I really adore of the HP Mini 1000, and a squashed 800 x 600 resolution, I didn't have anything else worth mentioning in my setup.

Does WiFi work? Although there's an Airport menulet in the menubar (now how redundant is that?), I've no way of verifying since we don't have a WiFi router at home.

Bluetooth? OS X asked for a bluetooth mouse - I plugged in my usb optical mouse but it wasn't recognized rebooting with it plugged in already caused the system to hang - but I didn't have a bluetooth mouse so I wouldn't know. Pairing with my cellphone would be pushing it, I thought.

The weirdest thing is that I'm getting an error message each time I get to the desktop.

"The system extension "name of kext" was installed improperly and cannot be used. Please try reinstalling, or contact the product's vendor for an update"

After trying to manually install the kexts; that is, replacing stuff from the /System/Library/Extensions folder and then deleting the /System/Library/Extensions/Caches folder along with the Extensions.mkext file with still the same original lame result, I'm fed up.

I'm not gonna bother trying to go further with this so I'm downloading iDeneb v1.3 now. I'm through part 8 of the entire series of .rar files. Maybe within this weekend, I'll be able to test.

Keeping my fingers crossed.

I followed Res' guide for creating a bootable HDD with OS X Leopard, sticking as closely as I could to the guide. That is; I used Universal Installer and stuff (his custom HP Mini plugin etc.). But I'm still getting kernel panics when I boot my HP Mini 1001TU off the HDD I just created.

It must be because I'm not using a Retailer DVD installer of OS X: yep, I'm still stuck with the two installer DVD's of yore. 

Seems I'm pretty much stuck with XP for now....

Stubborn people just never give up on getting OS X Leopard to work on their HP Mini 1000. And some stupid stubborn people just won't download the dang iDeneb v3 10.5.5 (which is the way to go according to sources) either from torrent or rapidshare or megaupload because they don't have a decent net connection that's fast enough to handle the genormous 3.5 GB or up of this DVD installer.iso file. 

So what do stupid stubborn people with only a dated msiwindosx86 and iDeneb 10.5.4 that wouldn't even boot, do?

They try and try until they succeed burn out. Which is what this one exactly stupid stubborn person did over the last weekend:

Create an OS X Leopard Installer out an external HDD.

Disclaimer: exactly stupid stubborn person, me, did not think up this brilliant idea; I got it from here.

What you need: HP Mini's bios should be F.05 for this to work according to sources.

1) A working Mac. I don't have a real Mac so I used my MacBook Wind which is currently happily running OS X 10.5.6.

2) External hard drive. I ripped off my ancient lappie's 20GB ATA (yes, ATA, not SATA) and dumped into one of those cheapo 2.5" external HDD cases.

3) Retail OS X Leopard DVD Installer. Again, I don't have this nor can I download it, so I'm left with my msiwindosx86 and iDeneb-10.5.4-I-think DVD's.

4) Universal installer from PCWiz (I'm totally digging this site!)

5) HP Mini plugin for Universal Installer. This one's from Res over yonder at insanelymac.com. This plugin should be saved in the "Universal installer/Motherboards" folder.

6) Leopard 10.5.6 combo update from the Apple website.

 

What to do:

1) Plug in the external HDD to the mac and then launch the app "Disk Utility".

2) Partition the external HDD as GUID partition and format Mac OS Extended (journaled). 

- In the Disk Utiliy window, at the left side, click on the external HDD's icon (usually depicted as a yellow-orange disk), 

- At the right side, you click on the tab called "Partition". (If you don't see the tab, then you're not on the "main" external HDD. Click on the first, upper most yellow-orange disk icon and at the right of your Disk Utility window should change accordingly to show the tab).

- In the drop-down menu, choose 1 Partition. Give it a name. System automatically give you "Untitled 1" by default. (Quite imaginative huh?)



 

- Click on the "Options" button. This will bring up a menu. Choose the radio button that says "GUID Partition Table". Click on OK.



- Back on the main window, click on the "Apply" button. You can now close Disk Utility.

3) Insert and mount the OS X DVD installer and then launch the app "Terminal"

4) In Terminal, type this line:

cd /Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD/System/Installation/Packages

Or, if you're using msiwindosx86 DVD:

cd /Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD Slipstream/System/Installation/Packages

5) Hit Enter and next, type this line: 

open osinstall.mpkg

6) Hit Enter. The Mac OS X Installation program should start, showing you a window. Just choose your external HDD.

7) If you're using Retail OS X DVD Installer, skip this step. If you're using a iDeneb or any customized OS X Installer DVD, before starting the actual installation, click on the "Custom" button and uncheck Kernel patches and other stuff, like additional languages to save space and time during installation.

8) After installation is done, double click on the 10.5.6 combo update package and select the external HDD. 

9) Start Universal Installer. (You should've installed the tools/utilities on your Mac when you started this)

 

From Res's guide: 

*You're now in the Universal Installer window

1) Change HD to your USB device. 

2) Select motherboard package with X86_Essentials and select apply kext package then click install. 

3) Select motherboard package with HP_mini_1000_F.05-10.5.6. 

4) Select apply kext package and DSDT patch. 

5) select ethernet EFI string and EFI string for video card (intel GMA 950). 

6) Click install. 

7) Select PC-EFI V9 then click install again. (In order to reduce the possibility that PC-EFI could be installed not correctly. I prefer to install it separately.)

8) Launch DiskUtility and fix the permission of your USB device. Done. 

9) Now, congratulation, you have made a bootable USB device. Reboot your computer with F9 and select your USB device as boot disk then boot with "-v -f". Now you are able to boot into your OSX on your USB device.

What I did after my Step #8 because I wasn't able to download Universal Installer and Res' HP Mini plugin for Universal Installer.

1) Launch OSX86 Tools Utility. Get it from PCWiz Computer site.

2) Click on "Intall EFI/Run FDISK" button. It'll ask you some questions (I, in particular, don't understand what they're talking really about) so just OK it and type your password when it asks you so.

3) A new smaller window will come up. In it, click on the "Run script" button. Again, just type your password and hit Enter to confirm if you're asked to.

4) Terminal will open. Confirming what you're about to do. Just hit Enter or "y" then Enter. It will present you with a list of actions to do. Choose 4 (Chameleon EFI) and press Enter.

5) It'll take a couple of seconds then you'll see a list of drives in your system. Usually, the external HDD will be listed as disk1. So just type "1" and hit Enter.

6) You'll see some texts running in the Terminal window and then a confirmation that you're done. Close Terminal and you should now have a bootable external HDD with OS X in it.

But since I didn't exactly follow Res' guide, especially the part with the Universal Installer and HP Mini plugin involved, I did not succeed at all and got stuck at the exact line I was dreading.

"MAC framework successfully initialized using 5242 buffer headers and 4096 cluster IO buffer headers."

Bleh. Well, at least I still have one more straw at this by downloading the Universal Installer and Res' HP Mini plugin before I quit being stupid and stubborn and just get iDeneb 10.5.5.

Ok. So, like my love life that's now officially vamoosed -- dead, I may have been severely over optimistic about the whole thing. But hey, I was able to put OS X on my roomie's Asus 1000H with nothing but my (previously) trusty msiwindosx86 DVD installer! I mean, it's just gotta work somehow - as sure as the sun rises every morning, being able to install Leopard with the msiwindosx86 DVD is inevitable. And perhaps even more than that, I believed it to be a fact.

Alright, so that wasn't exactly as easy as that --I did have to scourge the net for some clue until I stumbled upon the custom made bios from osrom.net -- but the main point is that I did it and as proof of that success, my roomie's perched on her bed right at this moment, transferring some songs off her "Eeepple-complete-with-Apple-sticker" to her still-virgin-never-been-jailbroken iPod Touch.

She's using the world's most advanced and most coveted (at least in my own opinion) OS in the whole face of this earth - on a black Asus 1000H!

And so now, the question is: Why am I staring into Windows Vista Home Premium? And my touchpad has gone berserk for the Nth time so I've to reboot for the Nth time again because of crappy driver support?

The Sentellic touchpad on my MSI Wind, I admit, feels as if it chugged down 10 venti Americana from Starbs but at least its "jerkiness" (as in literal jerky movement - erratic) after waking up from sleep goes off eventually and I hardly even notice it.

I've failed after many many heart breaking attempts at putting my beloved Leopard on my HP Mini 1001TU. I only get this pitiful and not to mention cryptic, line:

"MAC framework successfully initialized using 5242 buffer headers and 4096 cluster IO buffer headers"

Kind of reminds of what a someone said in the movie "He's Just Not That Into You", that when guys dump girls, they try to deceive them with "I don't deserve you, baby". It sounds nice, but really, it just means he's dumping you.

Sugar-coating. Oh crap.

Ladies and gents, please welcome, the HP Mini 1000! Err, actually, the HP Mini 1001TU or so says the label on the box along with the part/product no. and the serial no.

I'll play around with this little drop dead gorgeous baby for a while with its stock Win XP Home and then I'm proudly off the races to OS X-ify it - bring it on!

Like all yuppies I have a pressing need to stash up for the rainy days (i.e. when the company decides to chuck me for good due to the worsening economy). However, I think I've been exposed to a viral epidemic that is the netbook craze -- started by Asus of course with their Eee PC 701. And so here I am, aware of the impeding danger yet unable to fully grasp it, the truth held at arms length is visible yet remains unfelt.

Against the odds, I'm getting a new netbook tomorrow. If all goes well; if I'm pleased with the pre-owned unit from the seller, I'll be starting a new blog.

Guess what: it's gonna be named "MacBook mini"

And yep, that's because I'm gonna put OS X Leopard on it! ;)

I knew it was a bad idea to stop by at the local mall where gadgets, specifically netbooks, abound like popcorn in movie houses. But what could a mere, netbook-lover/addict, like me do? There was simply no fighting the urge so I followed my feet where they led me.

That's when I came face to face with the HP Mini 1000. 

The moment was just as fatal as the day I met the first guy I ever had a crush on and have loved (though secretly now) ever since. My heart beat faster. Clearly, I was smitten and fallen beyond redeem for this netbook:

And I know I should be more reasonable but the only thing that's stopped me from getting it on impulse is if I'd be able to run OS X Leopard on it or not.

I've always known that the MSI Wind is by far the best netbook hackintosh to be had with its unparalleled compatibility with OS X Leopard thanks to the hardwork of people like Stellarola et. al. over at the msiwind.net forums. And with this reminder in my head, I've been sane enough to keep my credit card safe in my wallet.

But reading this has changed my view completely, and quite drastically.

I've been patient over and over again with the MSI Wind so much so that it's become MacBook Wind in these last months. What with the absolutely gorgeous looks of the HP Mini 1000, and some luck, I think I can endure anything just to transform it into a MacBook Mini.

Should I buy or not? Oh, if only netbooks were free.