Take Mini Outta the Dark

At long last! My Mini’s officialy unconfused now. It’s no longer mistaking itself as a Compaq Mini at boot up, thanks to afudos.

As I look back at my little experiment with bios editing via DMI edit, my guilt / conscience is racked with “shoulda-woulda-coulda” (kinda like an All Saint’s song, huh?).

1) If I had downloaded the afuwin utilities from this link, shoved it in a bootable USB key (which has become bootable because of FreeDOS; more on this in a later post), I could’ve backed up my Mini’s original bios as a .rom file on this same USB key.

2) Then I could’ve edited my bios with DMICFG.exe, running from the same bootable USB key without any worries at all aside from, of course, carefully following the guide on which particular info I could chang; no more, no less.

3) So, the moment I realized that editing my bios for it to pretend to be a MacBook2,1 or a MacBookAir1,1 didn’t help just like all AppleSMBIOS, SMBIOSEnabler, SMBIOSEFI kexts that I’d tried previously, I should’ve been able to just boot into FreeDOS again grâce à la same USB key and type in the prompt:

C:\> afudos.exe <name-of-bios-rom> /p /b /n /c

and hit Enter.

4) After that, I could’ve just reboot the Mini and find my HP logo restored in all its blue glowy presence.

But then again, I wouldn’t have done what I did if I could’ve just been less of an obsessed hackintosher.

It’s the Effing Effort That Counts

Right now, I’m installing Windows XP on the HP Mini 1000. I’ve partitioned the measley 60 GB 1.8″ PATA hard drive of the netbook, giving 4 GB to Bill Gates’ most ubiquitous OS as of the moment — ok, the most ubiquitous OS ever in the world. My external DVD drive has been wheering away for almost an hour now — oh, it’s stopped and I’m being asked to click on Next and then enter my product key whose all 25 characters I’ve practically memorized by heart — and gone over 1 reboot already.

Why am I doing this anyway? Didn’t I vow to love and cherish MacBook Mini forever? And that means with only Leopard as our main OS? Well, I’d been dumb enough to screw up the HP Mini’s bios with DMI edit – it’s now a Compaq and not an HP. I’m thinking reflashing the bios will restore the HP logo; I’d still have to find out once I get into Win XP and run the WinFlash utility from HP.

Silly me; I wanted so hard to cling on to MacBook Mini that in avoiding to obliterate Mac OS X, even just for a while, I even thought running Redmond’s baby via Parallels would do the trick and save me both from the agony of seeing XP (and using XP) and installing it. But it appears that one cannot flash the bios with a utility that’s made to run only on Windows in a pseudo Windows environment courtesy of virtualization. Nope. Nah-uh.

So, after 1 hour and 27 minutes, Win XP is “registering components” – registry! Ewww! Bleurk!

Aside from the obvious fact that I’m showing symptoms being Obsessive-Compulsive by wanting to get back the HP logo on my boot splash screen, what other purpose would having Win XP on the Mini serve?

I’ve decided to keep Win XP for good. Yes. As much as I hate it, until I find a way to teach myself how to create a BartPE bootable UFD, I’m stuck with this setup so I can:

1) update my bios – because the obsessive compulsive in me cannot stand not being able to stay up to date.
– I’ve flashed my bios to F.13 and it’s still a Compaq logo! =(

2) uTorrent on the MacBook Wind takes infinity (no kidding, there’s the infinity loop symbol alright for estimated download time). People have always said, at least those peeps on the net, that torrenting is always faster in Windows. So I’m gonna try.

3) On the MacBook Wind, streaming is also slow. Flash is notorious in Mac OS X, I’ll have to see in Windows. So there.
— Darn it! I just prepared the other bigger partition for OS X, and then just for kicks, tried to boot into Windows first, and here’s what I get:

“Error loading operating system”

Super: I’m absolutely thrilled.

R.I.P.

My MacBook Mini’s SD/MMC card reader is dead and yours truly is the culprit. The crime transpired just a little after one o’clock when I plugged in my Sony Ericsson’s M2 Memory Stick Adapter into the SD/MMC card slot on my precious and innocent MacBook Mini.

I thought that since I could do this on the MacBook Wind, there shouldn’t be any problem but, based on that grounds, I still cannot plead innocent; I should’ve known there was something amiss when I noticed that plugging in the M2 adapter on the Mini met some resistance (it obviously didn’t with the Wind) and just stopped right there and then. But, as if possessed by some dimwitted ogre-like psyche, I forced the card into the slot anyway.

Stupidity. Denseness. Imbecility. Folly.

And now, when I plug in a normal MMC card on the Mini, OS X doesn’t mount it anymore – it’s as if it hasn’t sensed something has been plugged in.

I’m in grief and right now, I think I’m still in the latter parts of the In Denial Stage; I still believe there’s hope still since when I go to the BIOS settings, I can still see that “USB: Single Flash” entry under the Boot Options – I’d have to resort to trickery to get to the BIOS with the MMC card in the reader slot though because the Mini would get hung up on the boot splash screen, which, by the way, sports a “Compaq” logo now instead of the stock “HP” one.

But I may be trudging forward to acceptance as I’d already reinstalled the dummy SD/MMC card that came with the Mini.

I still think it was a retarded thing for me to do – does that mean I’m still in the Anger stage then?

Ok, scrap that. But come to think of it; even the MacBook Air in all it’s tech-chic glory doesn’t even have an SD/MMC slot and, as it is now, my MacBook Mini still trumps it with 2 USB ports vs. 1. 🙂

HP = Compaq ??

You know you’ve caught on the real hackintoshing fever when you already have a working OS X installation in your previously just a mere lowly PC; tweaked and modified the system until you’ve got all the hardware components running – sleep/resume, battery, power management – and, yes, you’ve even purged your innocent Extensions folder of unnecessary kexts, breaking your system a couple or more times as consequence, just to improve your boot time which you’re keeping an eye on (now you need to scroll down when viewing your iPod’s stopwatch log list; it’s that long already).

Yet you still want more.

And then, one lazy, boring afternoon at the office (because of the recession, clients don’t buy your company’s product, thereby reducing the projects assigned to employees like you), as you read stuff about – yep, you got it right – hackintoshing, you come across a post in a forum or a webpage containing information on further custom tailor fitting your hackintosh. What happens is, you wind up doing what that post was saying.

Cut the chase and let’s just say I got my MacBook Mini as an HP Mini 1000, but because I followed what a certain post on the net said; it now thinks it was a Compaq Mini 700 in its past life before it was reborn to become a MacBook Mini. How come you say? Look at the pic below:

Apparently, in tweaking my BIOS information, I ended up replacing the HP logo on the boot screen with the Compaq one. I wouldn’t know which exact setting did the change as was excited enough not to take note of my original BIOS info and therefore have no way of undoing my deed.

Why did I do the deed anyway? I just wanted MacTracker to see my MacBook Mini as MacBook not a MacPro because I didn’t want my MacBook Mini to show up on the network with a MacPro icon.

If you’ve caught on the fever, click here to see where I got the blue pill 😉

Throwing Out Garbage

Starting hibernating
Sleepimage has garbage
Hibernating failed

After installing PC-EFIv9/Chameleon 10.1.12 over the iDeneb v1.3 default in preparation for updating my MacBook Mini, I started getting these weird messages which show up after Darwin loads and OS X is about to boot. Although it didn’t have impact on the performance whatsoever of my hackintosh setup, it would nice to be able to eliminate it just the same.

1) While in OS X, launch Terminal and type the following command:

$ sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

2) Reboot and when once you’re back in OS X, go to Menubar > Go > Go to Folder

and type in /Private/var/vm then hit Enter key
3) Delete the sleepimage file. The size of this sleepimage file depends on the size of your installed ram. As you can see below, on my MacBook Mini it says “2 GB” cause I’ve 2 gigs ram on me. If you’ve 1 gig ram, the sleepimage will be 1 gig as well.You will be asked to type in your account’s password. Once you delete the file, you’ll gain back the 2 gig of hard drive real estate it once occupied.Not sure if the results are uniform but in my case, I’ve noticed that my mini goes to sleep faster than before. I close the lid and everything shuts off –  fan, BT/WiFi, HDD; just as instaneously as hitting the switch off of a light bulb. Of course the white power led of the mini stays on, pulsating until I open again the lid in which case Leopard springs back to life.

Take Root

Coming from a Linux background, I’ve long wondered if the root user concept also exists in Mac OS X – it’s Unix after all and Linux is Unix like. There’s gotta be some common ground between the two, right?

Hackintoshing involves lots of googling and following how-to’s and such; one time I encountered reading “log in as root and copy the file in your root folder”.

Okay, so there’s this root user after all in Mac OS X. I already know that logging in as root is possible, I’ll just have to type in “root” as my username and then type in my root password – wait a second; “my root password”?

I did configure my account, designating a custom username and password, during Mac OS X Setup Assistant after initial install but I don’t reckon being prompted to specify a password for the root.

Thinking maybe I could look it up in System Preferences > Accounts, I was confused big time when I didn’t find anything there that said “root”. What am I supposed to do now? Turns out, this is what I should do:

1) Launch Directory Utility

2) Authenticate first if the lock is closed. Then go to the Menubar’s Edit > “Enable Root User”

3) Then specify your new root password; you’ll be prompted to type it in twice, the second one for verification.

If you want, you can also change your root password here, clicking on “Change Root Password” instead.

That’s about it and you’re done. However, I recommend closing again the lock – click again padlock icon at the bottom part of the Directory Utiliy window until it snaps close – just to be sure that no one can mess up with your root user password, especially if you’ve set your hackintosh to autologin.

New Look

Yesterday was pretty much a boring day with nothing much left to do – the myhpmini.com site was down and I couldn’t access my beloved Mac OS X part of the forums so for the time being, I blogged here. Yeah, that’s the reason why this site has had more than one post written in one day.

This morning, I checked again on the forums and much to my delight, it’s up and running again! Yay! And sporting a new look too. Spunky! I never liked the old look anyway – kind of a little too awkward for my taste; ugly fonts and all.