Dell Mini 9

Search for the Netbook...continued

We sold the Asus eee as the 7" screen had just too many issues. We liked the light weight and the wireless was very good but the screen resolution was just too low.

After a little research we settled on the Dell Inspiron mini 9 with an 8.9" screen at 1024 x 600 resolution, an Atom 1.6 ghz cpu, 1 gig ram and an 8 gig ssd. The machine is also highly upgradable with all the 'works' accessible by removing two screens on the bottom cover. Excellent! Of course, this is such a good machine that Dell stopped making it and replaced it with the much less usefull 10 - a larger screen with a http://www.canadaram.com to oder a 2 gig stick which is the max for this machine.

While we are there we need to get a bigger and faster SSD than the stock 8 gig one. They have the RunCore Pro PATA Mini PCIe 32 gig SSD. We drool over the 64gig model but it is too expensive, it costs more than the mini 9 and would take this project over the $500 mark which disqualifies it as a netbook.

Ok the goods have arrived. We first install the new ram and boot while holding down the 2 key to get to the BIOS. Doesn't anyone use DEL anymore? The BIOS version is A4. We enable the boot time diagnostic screen and disable quickboot mode (will reset later). We also enable bluetooth and USB legacy support (will disable later). We change the boot order to USB 1st, CD/DVD 2nd, removable devices 3rd and then the hard drive.

Next is to prepare the boot media but we can't find the 10.4 disc, we find the 10.5 DVD but the external dvd drives are all firewire, the usb externals are cdrw. We find a dell usb dvd from the D400 but it has a proprietary connector. Idiots. We have 10.3 on cd but that doesn't look good. Stores are closed, we could try the USB stick method but there is only one 8 gig stick here and it has a portable XAMPP Joomla setup i'd like to keep.

ok we went out and bought a usb case and stuck an LG combo drive in it. These are used in apple's machines and so should be compatible with osx. The apple rom drives are packed away and not sure if there are dvd or just cd.

Now to replace the stock SSD with the 32gig runcore. Done

Installation

We download the DellMiniBoot123v8.01.iso.zip 'type11' bootloader and extract the iso image and burn to a cd. Put it in the external dvd and start up the Dell.

At startup we press 0 (zero) to bring up the list of boot devices, although it should look to the dvd anyway as we changed the boot order.

The boot menu appears and the dvd is the top of the list anyway.

We press enter which loads the bootloader into darwin/x86 and displays the boot: prompt

We remove the bootloader cd and put in our retail osx 10.5 dvd.

At the boot: prompt we type press ESC and enter 9f and press enter. The osx install runs but then crashes and on restart we get 'NTLDR is missing' error message.

We restart and press 0 and choose the dvd. Same result so we go back to booting with the bootloader to get back to the boot: prompt

We power on and off the external drive. Press esc and enter 9f with the same result - 'you need to restart your computer'. So we remove the ssd and mount it using a usb cable - it is formatted as a windows NTFS vol - we reformat it as a mac osx partition and go back to the bootloader.

This time we decide to press F8 for startup options and select the mac osx install dvd. same result - crashes when it runs.

Same problem - looks like the LG drive is not compatible. Ok we need to look for an apple rom drive...none here so i created a disk image from the retail osx dvd and now cloning it to a USB stick. The usb devices are 81 and 82 so we boot from the type11 bootdisk and select the mac os x install dvd hd(1,2)

the apple logo appears but it errors with the same message. Doesn't look like osx likes this mini 9. Let's try one more thing. We download osxdvd.zip

First we turn on viewing the hidden files and then we extract the systemconfiguration folder to the library and the system files too. We run the bootloader and try the new usb osx image.

It loads darwin and crashes at the apple. All right enough, we download the dell mini 9 ubuntu restore and burn it to dvd.

It boots up no problem and starts installing ubuntu...we thought about installing the ubuntu netbook remix but it was an img file so we would have to use usb-imagewriter and burn it to a usb stick. A slower option and not customized for the mini 9.