A while ago I decided to jump in and upgrade to 10.6 on my HP mini 1030. It had been a while since I did 10.5, and I was in the mood for a bit of hackery.
I initially followed the first set of directions from mymacbookmini.com and I had very mixed results. The terminal commands weren’t always correct, or line formatted right, or spelled correctly. I eventually ended up getting a machine that booted, but didn’t shut down. Had wireless, but no sound control, and had some serious sleep issues. I dropped the project after spending hours in terminal and on forums, and pretty much felt like the ‘upgrade’ was a waste of time and the next step would be to re-install 10.5.
By the time I had regained my strength for round two of snow leopard hackintoshery, LeMaurien had updated the snow leopard install procedure and posted it here. This install method used an app called netbootMaker, and really reduced the amount of time spent in the terminal.
In this guide he also included a movie showing exactly what he typed into the terminal. This is doubly good because he typed the commands incorrectly into the blog post. In case you don’t want to watch the video, he wrote:
sudo -s diskutil list
newfs_hfs -v EFI /dev/disk0s1 mkdir /Volumes/EFI
mount_hfs /dev/disk0s1 /Volumes/EFI
And it should really be 5 lines. If you’re a terminal hacker you probably knew that by looking at it. If you aren’t – you’re welcome. Here are the 5 lines
sudo -s
diskutil list
newfs_hfs -v EFI /dev/disk0s1
mkdir /Volumes/EFI
mount_hfs /dev/disk0s1 /Volumes/EFI
One other issue I ran into is that I ended up getting partially through the terminal commands and got an error, and started over again. I’m not sure if anyone out there will run into this situation, but I needed to use the following commands to unmount and delete the mounted EFI partition.
umount -f /Volumes/EFI
rm -rf /Volumes/EFI
Now I have wifi, audio, ethernet, trackpad, and the rest of the usual suspects. I still need to look into the sleep issue, because the one in the guide uses a workaround called clamshell, and I believe it needs to be tailored to each computer model it is used on.
A geek’s work is never done!
If you’re on the fence – I really think you should go for it! If this is your first mac – it’s a cheap way to test it out. If it’s your tenth mac – welcome to the party! It’s fun to show people at coffee shops, and it’s nice to have a computer that is worth less than my car, for once!
Here’s what you need to get started!
Oh yeah, technically, you will need this as well…
Good Luck!
I used the exact same upgrade method about 2 weeks ago and I’m loving Snow Leopard so far. I gained a lot of HD space back and that is huge since I’ve got the HP Mini 1030NR with the 16 gb SSD drive. I, unfortunately am stuck with the no sleep issue as well. Please keep us updated if you do find a solution.
Will this work on the HP mini 110 1030NR as well? I did a load similar to this without terminal work, and I have no wifi.
RK: That’s the machine I have. I can’t really comment on your install, but I have WiFi working on my machine, just not sleep.
TinyEnormous, I went through this install, had no errors, but still no wifi, everything is working but wifi, and sleep. Any suggestions?
I’ve been trying to get sleep working with no luck. Do your audio controls work? I have audio but its fixed level. Also have you been able to get internal bluetooth to work? RK try to remove Sleepenabler.kext. You may need to reformat the EFI partition to get it working again. For some reason removing the kext and rebuilding the cache doesn’t fix the wifi issue unless you start over.
What did you do to get WIFI working on 10.6? What model HP Mini do you have exactly? Thanks for the post!
I got it working on my 1030NR…sleep is a problem though. Don’t take the Snow Leopard patch, I did that and had to start over. WiFi works great, though if I turn it off on the front of the machine, it wont work unless I restart the machine. Also – the light stays orange (indicating no Wifi) even though the Wifi is on.
SymPak – sadly, no. The audio is not adjustable on either the keyboard, the docklet, or the system prefs. My only option is to use the individua volume controls on youtube and quicktime videos. not a good solution!
Matt – 1030NR. Mine worked after doing the last round of terminal commands. It works better in 10.6 than in 105, actually! In 10.5 if I slept my machine and woke it up, I would often not have wireless, then I would have to restart with the external switch held down once or twice.
Neal – ditto on the light color.
I’ve been attempting to install Leopard on my 1030nr but it’s been quite difficult. From what I’ve found online, it seems like my bios (f.18) is an issue. Do you know if there are any bios restrictions with the functionality of a Snow Leopard install?
Hi Abby,
I honestly don’t know. I remember updating my bios before I did the 10.5 install, but I didn’t know that there were any bios that would prevent an install. I think you can upgrade and downgrade at will, so look to see if you can get an older version of the bios.
Hey Tiny. I followed the guide and your advice… you say you have a hp mini 110-1030nr, correct? I have the same model, everything is working but the wifi. Am I missing a kext? I googled everywhere for a solution, I hope to find one here.
Hi Joe! Yes I have a 1030NR, and wireless is working. I took a screen shot of my extensions folder for you. It doesn’t show anything weird, but maybe you are missing something. One thing weird is that the airport sometimes doesn’t work after the a crash. Simply restarting usually fixes it. Here is a link to the screen grab.
https://blog.tinyenormous.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Screen-shot-2010-01-05-at-8.38.10-PM.png
Joe, and RK:
I just noticed something. I didn’t think HP made two 1030NR models, but I guess they have both a 110 and a 1000 model. I have the 1000 model. The 110 has a different wifi chipset and people are currently working on getting it to run smoothly. Here is a link to the forum with 338 (and counting) posts. They seem to be working hard, hopefully it is right around the corner. One other option they mention is using the wifi card out of a mini 1000. Sorry for the confusion. That naming system is mildly obfuscated!
I finally got some time to spend trying to make sleep work. I messed around with the instructions that LeMaurien had for sleep (Step 4) with no luck. I saw lots of posts on myhpmini.com about memory…so I upgraded to 2gb RAM and Voila! Sleep works! Not sure why the memory matters, but clearly it does. Sleep via the menu and closing the lid now work, other than a slight crackle when it sleeps, it works great. I have a HP Mini 1000 (1030NR model).
I’m new to Hackintosh, and to Mackintosh for that matter. I have an HP 1035nr. I used iDeneb 1.6 and it’s working buy my video is at 800×600 and 1024×600. I have no audio. Not having sleep mode isn’t a huge issue to me as I just turn the netbook off when I am done with it, but if I can get that working and it’s isn’t a painful process, well then why not. So specifically what kexts do I need to get 1024×600 video and which ones do I need for audio? I also don’t think my webcam is working. It worked under iDeneb 1.3 but not under 1.6. Would really appreciate some straight forward simple answers. I have used Kext Helper to install the wifi kext without any problem. Also what is Quartz? Sorry I know I should know but like I said this is my first Mac/Hack :-)
can we hackintosh snow leopard hp mini 110 3004tu?with same method?
Seli – I really don’t know. Each different hardware revision changes everything. The new components could be compatible with osx, or they could not. The only way to know is to google it or give it a shot. The worst that could happen is you end up having to reinstall windows…
hey man! could you make an “installing mac os x 10.6 on hp mini 110-series for dummies” with all the kexts and stuff? it would be very helpful :)
Sorry Viktor,
I think the whole process has probably changed a bit since I first installed things. I also don’t want to have to run the risk of my laptop being don for a few days again. The tutorials that I liked to above were pretty clear, give them a shot!
_Ross
Time comes, if I have lots of money. I will buy laptop to make my work easier and faster.
I know this is somewhat off-topic. Where did you get the large apple decal for the hp mini? I like how you have it placed “eating” the HP symbol and wanted to see about doing something similar. I can’t find that large of a decal anywhere though.
Hey Andrew. It’s one of the ones that comes with desktop macs. I don’t think the ones that ship currently are much smaller. Ask around at your IT dept, they may just have a stack of them…
Hi i finished a hackin to a hp mini 110-1020nr but my wifi does not catch can you help me?? Please also the link to the snow leopard procedures is dead can you point me to where they are.
Mine ended up with a weird arrangement of holding down the wifi button while restarting, releasing the button. shutting down, and then restarting again. I have since bricked it, so I can’t test out those directions. sorry.