Daily Blogged

The good, good people over at the MyDellMini forums have been working hard to get Snow Leopard up and purring on the Mini 9 since September, and now everything finally works. I’ve been waiting to publish this guide until Meklort released the final version of NetbookBootMaker .8.3, which resolves the issue of audio in/out not working for the Mini 9. Also, this guide will work with a Dell Mini 10v, I just excluded that from the title because it would’ve made it drastically longer.

Preparation

These are the things you’ll need:

1. A Dell Mini 9/10v with at least 16GB of storage

2. A Retail Snow Leopard DVD with 10.6.0 or 10.6.1 (10.6.2 broke Atom support)

3. An 8GB or greater flash drive

4. A machine running OS X

The first thing you’ll want to do is format that flash drive. Open up Disk Utility (Applications -> Utilities) and choose the flash drive from the sidebar. Then, go to the Erase tab and choose “Mac OS Extended Journaled” as the file system, and then click the Erase button.

Now, put in that Snow Leopard DVD and go back to Disk Utility. Go to the flash drive in the sidebar and this time go to the Restore tab. From the sidebar, drag the CD over to the source box and the flash drive over to the destination box. Press the restore button. This will take about an hour or so, so be patient.

Now that you’ve copied all the installation files, you need to use NetbookBootmaker to make your flash drive bootable. Launch NbBM, select your flash drive, and click “Prepare Boot Drive.” NbBM will do its thing and make your drive bootable.

Installation

Now that you’ve got your flash drive prepared, you need to boot it with the Mini 9. Make sure legacy USB support is enable in your BIOS. Plug in the flash drive and boot the Mini. When you see the BIOS screen, hit 0 (zero) to bring up boot options and choose your flash drive. It’ll boot into the Snow Leopard installer.

Note: If you get the “pinwheel of death” when booting, wait up to ten minutes. After that, try rebooting.

When you’re at the install screen, go to Utilities -> Disk Utility and format your drive in Mac OS Extended Journaled and name it “Macintosh HD”. Continue with the installation. It’ll take a long time. I timed mine with my iPod and it took an hour and a minute.

Once the installation is done, reboot.

Setup

Booting your hackintosh’d Mini 9 for the first time will take awhile. After it boots, you’ll get the intro video (neat, huh?) and then the setup screen will appear.

After you fill in your information, you’ll be brought to the desktop. OS X will be ungodly slow until you repair permissions, so it’s time for your old friend, Disk Utility. Select your hard drive, and then click ‘repair disk permissions’ and let it do its thing.

When that’s done (which’ll take awhile) you can enjoy your new netbook running OS X Snow Leopard.

Tips

1. Safari is strangely slow on the Mini 9, so I would recommend using Camino for your web browser, as it uses less memory.

2. If you want to use your Mini 9 with iTunes, you can use Home Sharing to copy over your music from another machine.

3. A neat trick you might try is controlling your Mini 9 using Remote Desktop.

Thanks

A special thanks goes out to everyone at the MyDellMini forums, especially Meklort.