Before I get started with this how-to I’d like to say that a week in the Bahamas was just the kind of break I needed – I’m well rested, energized, and motivated.  I’m back in school on Monday, completing my BS, and I was motivated once I got back and I’m nearly caught up at work.

I took my Wind on vacation with me and it came in very handy – I wasn’t often in the position of needing to access the Internet, but when I did it was nice that it weighed in at only a couple pounds so it’s portability was much better than a conventional notebook.

Before we get started you should make sure you have a couple things:

  • Your Wind needs BIOS version 1.09
  • You need an external DVD drive
  • You need an external Harddrive

I verified I had the 1.09 BIOS by pressing the Delete key during the boot process and looking in the BIOS under System Information.  I won’t cover flashing your BIOS – that info is available elsewhere.

My next step was to download the MSIWindOSx86.iso (I have a retail Leopard DVD purchased exclusively for this project) and while I waited for that to complete I formatted the 500 GB external drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with a single partition which I labeled “500GB_Leopard_On_Wind.”  This took about 30 seconds while the download took about ….. 3 hours.

I whipped out Toast 8 and burned my DVD.  I plugged my USB DVD drive (An LG GSA-E60L) into one USB port and my USB harddrive into another (I used a Macally G-S350SUA enclosure and Western Digital WD5000AACS GreenPower).  Although my enclosure has Firewire and eSATA the Wind has only USB 2.0, so be aware of that when looking at the types of connections you will want to make.

Here are my formatted drive’s stats:

Capacity 465.4 GB — 499763888128 Bytes

Available after format 465.3 GB — 499602382848 Bytes

Used 154.0 MB — 161505280 Bytes

To perform the install first insert the DVD into your USB DVD drive and power on the Wind.  During the boot you will want to press F11 to display the list of bootable devices – select your DVD drive and press enter.  During my initial boot using this process a screen displaying scrolling white on black text appears listing several diagnostics and errors which scrolled by and which are replaced after a few minutes by the familiar Leopard installer.

After selecting the language (English) and pressing the hard-to-see arrow on the bottom right you will be taken to the Leopard Welcome screen.  Read everything under “More Information” and click continue – you will be able to read and accept the License which you must agree to if you want to go any further.

On the next screen you will see displayed all available volumes for installation.  Be VERY careful if you don’t want to overwrite your local disk – I certainly did not.  It helped that I had labeled my external volume something I could readily see “500GB_Leopard_On_Wind” really stuck out.  This is the volume I selected and when I did so a message appeared in the bottom pane indicating the following:

Installing this software requires 7.1 GB of space.

You have chosen to install this software on the volume “500GB_Leopard_On_Wind.”

Press the continue button to proceed to the Install Summary page.  On this page select “Customize” from the lower left-hand corner which displays a list of available packages.  Under the Patches parent you will need to un-check “Kernel” which removes the mach_kernel_10.5.1_ToH_Sleep.

After verifying the DVD, which takes a couple minutes, the install commences automatically.  This process, which required no user interaction, took about 30 minutes.  Post-install a nice big green circle appears with a happy white check in it which communicates that the install has successfully completed.  The machine will restart automatically, so be prepared to press F11 and boot your external harddrive.  For the rest of this install the external DVD drive is no longer required.

When I pressed F11 I chose “Ext Harddrive” from the menu and was taken to another friendly unix-like boot menu which displayed the native volume (Windows) and my external volume “500GB_Leopard_On_Wind” – naturally we want to book the external volume, whatever it’s called.  Leopard starts up and after a few minutes of flickering and gentle humming the intro movie begins.  Sound, keyboard, trackpad, and function keys are all working properly and the graphics appear just fine.  I select the country (USA) and keyboard layout (USA) and the transfer settings dialog starts.  Now, lacking firewire, I won’t be able to do the migration manager at this point.  So I choose to do nothing and click next, beginning the network dialog.  Since my Wireless isn’t yet working I plug in an Ethernet cable and use DHCP to get an address.  This is required to do the software updates.

I complete the OSX software updates (including the update to OS X 10.5.6) and reboot.  I read that there were issues with the keyboard and trackpad drivers, so I had my mac keyboard and mouse local.  After rebooting this was a necessary accessory.  I had the wireless device, keyboard, trackpad and intel graphics device drivers on a USB thumb drive and used my mac keyboard and mouse to mount this USB drive and install the drivers:

msiWindDrivers.mpkg (do not install Coolbook or ChameleonEFI drivers)

RALink Wireless Utility (you must have used Fn-F11 to wake the wireless up)

Video requires the Kext Helper and ApplenetGMA950.kext, LaptopDisplay.kext, AppleIntelIntegratedFramebuffer.kext.

Each driver update requires a reboot, which is relatively tame if you remember to hit F11 and boot your external harddrive.  You can subvert this process by going into the BIOS and making sure USB harddrives boot before local harddrives in the Boot priority.

Some notes and caveats:

After I updated to 10.5.6 I ran into an issue where my external harddrive failed to appear during boot after hitting the F11 key.  I solved this by completely powering down the Wind and the USB harddrive, removing the AC power from the harddrive and powering it back up prior to booting the Wind.  I assume this has to do more with USB than anything else and consider it more an annoyance than a problem.

The RALink Wireless Utility is feature rich and detects more available networks than Airport does – do not try and go back, your wireless card will only appear as a regular Ethernet connection.  As far as I am concerned Airport is deceased on this machine.

Be sure you have a retail copy of Leopard – I had one from a co-worker who foolishly insisted on going back to Tiger – you like Apple right?  Let’s show some support.

Migration Manager is available post-install and can use wireless.  What I did was enter the migration assistant on the Wind and choose to migrate from another mac and it supplies a 6 digit code.  On my Macbook Pro, which I want to migrate FROM,  I open the migration assistant and choose to migrate TO and enter the 6 digit code.  During this process you can’t run any other programs, so be prepared for a long and boring wait.  I used a crossover cable between my Macbook Pro and the Wind using 10.0.0.1 and 10.0.0.2 respectfully and this process should take quite a bit of time to complete given the 200+ gigs I have to copy over.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)