Successful install of Snow Leopard OSX on Dell 11z

[vijayk]

Finally I got my Dell 11z to boot Snow leapord successfully with full resolution 1366x768, wireless, touchpad.

I had been trying to find somewhere some doc to do this and never was able to find any which moved beyond a basic install with a lot of problems after that as well.

So here it is for pple who have been frustrated with 11z and not being able to run OSX on it.

 

The following worked

1. Proper resolution 1366x768

2. Wireless

3. Touchpad.

and maybe other stuff as well.

 

Please use the following guidelines which I tried. This is a process for installing netbook though it worked for me fine on 11z.

 

Main Steps:

1. You will need a machine with OSX working partially to patch.

2. Using the partially working OSX on the machine, you have to patch a USB which has the restored image of the SL DVD with the netbookmaker patch.

3. Finally install OSX using the USB.

 

This is what I did to get Snow leopard working on my Dell 11z.

 

1. You need a retail Snow Leopard DVD. Just buy it, it's only $29.

2. Use ISO image to create your boot cd at osx86svboot.iso.zip . Create an ISO image onto a DVD/CD and use it to boot the OSX install DVD so you can install from it.

to boot and install using the retail dvd. The DVD doesnt boot directly off the DVD drive.

3. Once your in, do the partitioning in your hard drive and install OSX. It will terminate with an Install failure. This is what happened for me.

4. Just restart the machine. You should use the PsyStar ISO which you downloaded(osx86svboot) to initially boot and then select the newly installed snow leopard on your machine.

5. Sometimes it might not load proper. Restart and try.

 

 

6. Once your logged in. You should see that the resolution is 1024x768 or something. Wide and not very impressive. This is just going to help us to patch the USB with SL later.

7. Once your logged in you can use the Disk Utility and then click on restore and select the SL DVD for source and the USB for destination. This will create a installer USB with the ISO image of the DVD.

8. Download NetBootMaker from here: Downloads - netbook-installer - Project Hosting on Google Code Get the latest version

9. Run NetBootMaker on your current Leopard install (or any working Mac). It will ask you for a volume to patch, pick the USB device you restored the SL DVD to. It will create a patched install you can use to install SL.

 

 

10. Boot from your patched USB volume. Don't boot it from Chameleon, it will panic. Hit ESC at boot and pick the USB drive from the list.

11. I completely wiped my drive (EFI partition too) by running Disk Utility and re-partitioning the drive (still as single partition GUID). I just wanted to do this to make sure nothing was left over from Leopard. You probably should too. You made backups, right?

12. Install Snow Leopard removing the older one which you installed temporarily for patching the OSX on the USB.

14. SL installs and should show successful install and restart.

15. At this point you should be able to boot from your machine with the new install which has proper display, wifi, mouse etc . At times it hangs. Oops. Restart and try. Will need to find out why?

 

You might need to try out the following as well, but it was working fine for me. This helps you to have a bootloader in place. Will update as I do it and test it out.

1. Now you have a full SL install on your boot volume, but no bootloader. Reboot from your USB device again. In the Utilities menu of the installer, you'll see "NetBookInstaller". Run it. Ignore the "unsupported" warning.

2. Uncheck everything but "Install Chameleon" and "Install General extensions". The "General Extensions" are the graphics, bluetooth, trackpad etc. drivers, so you needn't worry about installing them.

3. Boot into SL. Everything should work except sound, speed-stepping and Ethernet. You can install the drivers for those (the same ones we've been using: VoodooHDA, VoodooPower, AttansicL1, etc.) using Kext Helper (I was not able to get installing them to /Extra to work).

 

When I checked what the display has been recognized or used, its GMA950 instead of GMA4500. As you know we patched, so I think the GMA950 driver used there also works on GMA4500 as well. Dont know what problems it has on the hardware if there is. So we have proper resolution anyway.

Please note that this is the process I used and it worked for me. Use this at your own risk.

 

NOTE: At times OSX didnt boot off and the gray screen to shutdown and restart turned up. Usually when you have a proper boot loader in place I think it should work perfectly. If your trying out with the installation only, then when you try to use -v at the boot prompt it boots proper. Oops I dont know why? Maybe the fix should be setting up a proper boot loader.