OSX Leopard installed on Mini 9 w/ No DVDrom

For those that google and find my post please use this at y0ur own risk.

Background: I purchased a Dell mini because it was cheap :

+310 16 gig SSD with 1 gig memory

+30 for J613H 1 Card,Wireless,Internal Bluetooth,QH/YM ordered seperate

+20 2 gig memory stick

+18 Zagg Invisibleshield

I later found out that OSX leopard 10.5 could be run on it. I was intrigued and wanted my mini to have the same OS as a macbook! How cool would that be?

So if you have (2) usb thumb drives and a windows pc you too can load OSX without the need of a CD/DVD rom. I didn’t want to spend any more than I had to enjoy my unit.

Step One: Check list
* One Vista (or possibly XP) computer…but I have only tested on Vista.
* One copy of OSX, in my case I used a retail DMG backup of 10.5.4
* USB Flash drive #1 2gig (For OSX Leopard 8+ gig flash drives are best)
* USB Flash drive #2 8gig (For Type11 – Makes PC think it’s a Mac)

Step Two: Create the Type11 Bootable flash drive
The type11 or boot123 is commonly known on the mydellmini, as the tool that allows your pc to boot OSX because it gives the OS the impression that you are in fact a real mac. Let the cloaking begin:

To make the Type11 USB Flash Drive you will need access to a Windows machine.
* Format the USB stick in the FAT32 format.
-right click and format flash drive
* Download Syslinux 3.63
* Expand that zipfile. In the win32 subdirectory there is an executable called syslinux.exe. At the command prompt line (Start—> Run—>CMD) type:
run syslinux -ma f: and press enter (assuming F: is the drive letter referring to your freshly formatted USB stick and your command line is in the right directory of syslinux; replace with the correct drive letter if necessary running this command will happen quickly. I didn’t even think it happened the first time but rest assure it works. )
* Copy the contents of the Type11 v7.7 ISO http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=8c116d784f7e1de2ab1eab3e9fa335cae14d84bdb06f32a8(not the image itself) to the USB flash stick, taking care not to overwrite anything that syslinux put on the USB stick (syslinux only placed one file on the stick that is hidden) ( I use Winrar to extract the ISO to my flash drive)
* You now have a bootable Type11/Boot132 USB flash drive
* You can test it right away by rebooting your Mini 9 and changing the boot sequence to USB boot.

Step Three:
Create an OSX Leopard Bootable flash drive
With your second USB flash drive plugged in to windows xp/vista

Download macdrive 7.0
once installed click on format or repair Mac disks
select modify Mac volumes(create, format and delete Mac volumes)
with the usb drive connected click next
you will see 2 volumes on the drive select the usb drive.
format your usb drive with HFS+

mount the dmg file and proceed to copy your downloaded .dmg contents using the below method

Open a command prompt (start —- run—cmd)
Type: diskpart and press Enter. ( it will Create the MBR for the device)
Type: list disk. A list of your connected hard drives will appear. Make sure you see your flash drive on the list. In the example below my 8GB flash drive is Disk 2. (images to come)

Type: select disk 2 (but change the disk number to whatever your drive is)
Type: clean. It should only take a few seconds to clean.
Type: create partition primary. This command should complete almost immediately.
Type: select partition 1
Type: active
Type format fs=fat32 to format the flash drive. This took about 10 minutes on my drive.
Type assign
Type exit

Now we need to copy the DMG contents to the USB drive Now that the MBR has been setup.

I assume d: DVDROM drive e: is the usb drive (d can also be a mounted DMG file of OSX leopard)

Now xcopy d:\*.* /s/e/f e:\

Step Four:
Insert the Leopard thumb drive into a USB slot on the right hand side of the Mini9
Insert the Type11/Boot132 thumb drive into a slot on the left.
Turn on the machine, make sure USB Legacy is Enabled in the BIOS.
Press 0 while booting to get the boot menu, choose USB Drive, you should see some SYSLINUX text zipping across the screen, when you get a prompt, hit enter. You’ll proceed to boot up into the Leopard installer.

Sleep is in the latest version- just make sure USB Legacy and USB Wake are disabled in BIOS.
Ill be testing these instructions soon but for those daring!

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• OSX Leopard 10.5 Mini 9 USB install
• Dell Mini 9 How to install Windows 7 from a USB Key without a DVD
• PS3 Can play Xvid movies
• How to Install Windows 7 From USB Drive without Windows 7 ISO DVD