Blog | OSX | mechdrew

I finally took a look at my Troubleshooting page and I nearly gasped at how outdated it was. Everything was still stuck at the time DellEFI was at 1.1! (For those who don’t know, DellEFI was the old software that got replaced by NetbookInstaller months ago.) Tonight I did a complete revamp of the page, removing a lot of unnecessary and obsolete items and adding more “substance” to each item. Hopefully this will help others learn more about what is actually going on in some of the more advanced tips.

I also added a hardware page (Tip 1) that will hopefully explain why some stuff works and others don’t, it could use some more content so if you have any favorite accessories that you use or questions about why some netbooks don’t work, please leave a comment or use the Contact page to send me an e-mail.

I finally got the NetbookInstaller 4 : Direct Install from Mac to SSD/HDD guide written and posted. I’ve also done a little rearranging on the guides page. There seem to be a few too many people trying to use the old methods, which is somewhat ridiculous considering that they are outdated and no longer supported. As such they are still at the same address but I have moved the links to a new page, which can be accessed from the Guides page. Now that I have the actual install guides updated from the DellEFI days, I have one more monumental task: the Windows-only guide.

Good news on that front, though: meklort has been working on making the NetbookBootMaker app into a cross-platform program that will run not only on Mac OS X but also on Windows and Linux. I will try to create a guide before then, but once that new app is out everything could change. No time table on the new version, and don’t ask me, I’m not directly involved in the development.

So far, I’ve managed to transfer over all of the important material from dellefi.mechdrew.com. Some things, like the outdated Intro files, were left behind because they simply aren’t as accurate anymore.

As for my own Dell Mini, I just barely got audio working again on the 10v. My next step is to backup the entire thing, then I’m going to try and replicate what caused my issue in the first place. I have a fairly good idea what it was, a combination of the dsdt.aml file and some faulty methods in NetbookInstaller.