Wednesday, June 24, 2009

building a triple boot Dell Mini 10v

The goal: to put OSX on a Dell Mini 10v. But why stop there? I decided to make it a triple boot.
After much installing and reinstalling, here are some tips that helped me along the way.

First off, if all you want is OSX, follow this guide:
http://dellefi.mechdrew.com/guide/method1.shtml
It's pretty straightforward, but follow everything to the letter. For example, if you decide to call your disk "Fred" instead of "OSXMINI9" the install will fail.

Now, if you want to do two or more different OSs, you need to know:
a) Don't partition the drive as GUID, partition as MBR. You can make a gparted boot disk to do this, but if you've got the modified OSX installer, that will be just fine.
b) To install OSX on a MBR partitioned disk, you need to modify the installer. See this:
http://dellefi.mechdrew.com/guide/advanced3.shtml

Quirks I had to work around:
a) Installing Linux and Windows7 were trivial. The main problem I had was with OSX.
At various times, it would boot and then panic, sometimes in plain text mode, sometimes with the equivalent of the BSOD. To fix that, I found I had to boot from the OSX Installer USB key, open up a terminal, and issue this command:
rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions/AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext/

b) After Windows7 was installed, the system would only boot into Windows. I booted up using the USB key, booted my Ubuntu partition, and used gparted to look at the drive. The only partition marked "boot" was the Win7 partition, so I switched boot to the Ubuntu partition. After that, everything worked fine.

So, I now boot up into the Chameleon bootloader. If I want to switch from the default (OSX), I hit the - key, and it shows me a list of my OS choices.

c) You can use an external CD/DVD. I found that the Ubuntu installer kept failing, so I made a USB installer which worked fine. Could be bad media, bad drive, not sure. Stick to USB is my suggestion.

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