I have had the bug to get a mac for several months now, but the price seemed to be a natural antibiotic. The next best thing… a hackintosh, but again the hardware compatibility means special buys, and you are not really going to save a lot… And some of the processes to convert your machine are VERY involved. Enter the Dell Mini 9 that I have. Apparently it’s a perfect match hardware wise (although I can’t use a 16GB SD card in the slot and my Mic is not working).
First issue. Most of the boot loaders require you to have a mac already to prepare the initial image. Now, I’m sure those with mac’s already either a) don’t require a hackintosh, or b) want one as an educational challenge… muppets.
Enter Mechdrew.
I am not attempting to bypass Mechdrew’s excellent set of tools or his process and chances are my post is now out of date 
I did have to alter the process a little bit so I thought I would clarify what I did for prosperity. BTW, I didn’t want dual boot, and so don’t ask me anything about it.
The mini 9 does not come with a CD ROM drive, but I had an external one, and this process seemed the easiest. There are processes for doing it all via meory stick, but again, my choice was the CD method. The Retail edition of Snow Leopard is Dual Layered… 7.5GB… make sure your CD can read it.
You will need a retail edition of OS X (I used 10.6 – Snow Leopard anything else and go find another process). This will also nearly fill the 8GB internal drive, I’d recommend an upgrade with a Runcore SSD – they are cheap and immensely fast. While you’re at it, buy more memory… You can never have too much memory.
From mechrdrews download site, download the following components.
- NetbookCD 0.8.3 RC4 ISO (and burn it to a blank CD)
- NetbookInstaller 0.8.2 Final (and put on a memory stick)
- NetbookInstaller 0.8.3 RC4 (and put on a memory stick)
- About this Mac (and put on a memory stick)
Yes, get both the NetbookInstallers – this is important! 0.8.4 may fix the bug that means you need to do this this, but for now… get them both. If you do not, you will not be able to reset your BIOS to disable legacy USB support which in tern will mean you will not get sleep to work properly at the end of the process.
So, boot off the NetbookCD. When you get to the chameleon boot loader eject the disk and slip in the Snow leopard DVD. wait a few seconds then press F5 (fn + G) when the list of items change, select the “Mac OS X Install DVD”. And you’re off.
- Select your language and press Continue.
- Press Continue on the Welcome screen.
- Press Agree.
- Go to Menu Bar>Utilities>Disk Utility….
- Select your internal drive and delete anything on it.
- Create a new volume formated as Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
- Press Apply.
- When finished, closed Disk Utility.
- Select your newly-formatted drive, press Continue.
- The process then continues.
- Installation will probably get to the end and report that it has failed. Again, this is normal, just press Restart.
I had to then boot back off the NetbookCD but I eventually got to the Mac Desktop (after following the steps to install a user and connect up to my local wireless)
Plug in your memory stick with the tools above on them. Open the zip file with NetbookInstaller 0.8.2, then one that has unpacked, run it. Do the same with 0.8.3. Then finally run the About this mac package. This is the moment of truth. Shut down your system.
Disconnect your CD drive and power on… it should get to the mac desktop.
Right, now you need to ensure you have disabled “Legacy USB support” in your BIOS, so reboot and go into the setup, then let the machine reboot again. Everything (bar the mic and the SD slot in my case) should now work. You may need to BIOS tweak to get my issues fixed, and I’ll keep you posted.
For interest, I used a retail copy of Snow Leopard 10.6.0. Mechdrew says to not use software updater however that worked for me.