My MacBook Wind

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.

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.