I did my second hackintosh installation this evening. It went well once I downgraded the BIOS, but getting to that point was quite an ordeal.
Omninerd has a really decent walkthrough on the overall install. But it leaves out a lot of detail on how to go from BIOS version A06 to A04. Of course, my Dell Mini 10v shipped with BIOS A06.
Basically, I had to take my 512 MB USB disk and make it into a bootable DOS disk. After a bit of looking I discovered “DOS-on-USB” (C) 2008 created by James Holmes. This is a great utility with a straightforward walkthrough.
I’ll save you some time if you’re following the process – when you’re setting up DOS, don’t install the EMM component. The BIOS downgrade doesn’t like this component and won’t execute if it’s installed.
The other hiccup I encountered was the nasty little message the BIOS flasher threw at me: “Cannot flash when DOSKey is present” didn’t sound like it was going to go very well. Fortunately, a little snooping around and I learned that the way around this is to hold down the shift key during the DOS boot.
Oh, and one last thing. I’m sure you can figure this one out for yourself, but you need to run the BIOS updater executable with a switch to get it to downgrade from the newer to older version. When you get booted into DOS, run R225278.exe /forceit to enable the downgrade.
Weapons free and happy hunting.
QuantumTom 