Dual Boot Windows 7 and OSX on your HP 2140

Now that you’ve got your sleek little HP 2140 netbook, its time to blow away Windows XP and put something a bit snazzier on there.  I’ve toyed with OSX86 previously, and knew that most of the netbooks out there support it in one way or another, and many of them quite well. I had also read that Windows 7 played very nicely on these tiny computers, and it’s free for a few months, so why not?

Here’s how I made it work – there may be better ways, but this worked for me, mostly:

Install OSX86 – most of the OSX install is based on this information Try as I might I was only able to get this to 10.5.6. I ran into consistent problems with trying to upgrade to 10.5.7. Maybe you’ll have better luck.

Go out and buy yourself a valid Leopard OSX license.

Find iDeneb 1.3 iso – you know where to look. Download these HP Essential OSX files HERE

Make a USB-bootable thumb drive, from the iDeneb iso, if you don’t have an external DVD drive to burn the Iso to.

You’ll need a mac to do the following:

1. Open up Disk Utility.app in /Applications/Utilites/
2. Select the drive you will be using in the left hand pane.
3. Click the “Erase” tab
4. Under “Volume Format” select Mac OS Extended
5. Click Erase
6. Click the “Restore” tab
7. If you havn’t already, go to your iDeneb.iso and double click it.
8. Back in Disk Utility, you should see the iDeneb.iso in the left pane with another image under it with an apple logo on it.
9. Drag the image to the “Source” location
10. Drag your drive you have erase to the “Destination” location.
11. Click Restore
12. Open up UInstaller and select your newly formatted drive
13. Check the “Install PC_EFI v9 Chameleon Edition 1.0.12”
14. Click Install

Now you can boot with the USB drive. The next part is tricky:

Power off the netbook, and plug in your USB drive.

You’ll need to plug in an external monitor to the VGA port and a USB keyboard and mouse to the other USB port- I used a Mac keyboard, as it has a USB input on it for my mouse.

Now power it up, and quickly press F10. You should get into the BIOS. You can go right ahead and Exit and save changes. This is just to get the USB drive recognized for boot. This time, quickly press F9.  You should see your two boot choices show up on the screen – USB Hard Disk and Notebook hard Drive. Now, before choosing one, you need to switch to the external monitor ONLY. Press the FN key and F2 until the external monitor is on, and the notebook LCD is off.

Now, choose USB Disk and press enter to begin the iDeneb installation. You’ll need the USB keyboard and mouse until the very end.

Everything on your mini is about to be erased.

1. The installer will now begin. Wait at the apple logo until a language selection screen is shown. Select your language and hit next.
2. Go to the top of the screen where it says utilities. From this menu select “Disk Utility”
3. Click on the Mini’s Hard drive in the left pane.

Use the Disk Utility partition manager to create two partitions. Make the first one formatted as free space and the second formatted as Mac OS Extended

After erasing is complete, exit the disk utility
Now click next and select your newly erased hard drive as the destination.

On the next screen you will see an option at the bottom that says “customize”. Click on it and apply the following patches:
a. Expand “fixes” and select: acpi, cpu, and remove firewire
b. Under “patches” expand chipset and select ichx fix
You can now continue with the installation.

First, run the VooDooPS2 Controller package. When prompted, make sure to check that box that says trackpad. Go through all the prompts until it’s installed. Reboot.

Now with working trackpad and keyboard, Open up OSX86 Tools again. Go ahead and reinstall all the kexts in the kext folder.
1. Click on “Install kexts” towards the bottom right
2. Find the kexts folder on your flash drive. Select the first one.
3. Shift+Click the last one to select all.
4. After the installer completes it will ask you reboot. Do it.

To enable Quartz open OSX86 Tools and click the Enable/Disable Quartz GL button. It will tell you the current status. If its disabled, feel free to enable it by clicking the button that says “Enable Quartz GL”.

If you start ActivityMonitor before doing this you will see that OSX only sees 1 processor (press the CPU tab below te process list). To allow it to use the second core do the following:

1) Open Terminal when logged in as an Admin user.
2) Gain root access (“sudo su -” and enter your user password).
3) cd /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration
4) Recommend backing up “com.apple.Boot.plist”. Copy it to your home directory or somewhere else.
5) Edit “com.apple.Boot.plist”. Use vi (ie: vi com.apple.Boot.plist). Move the cursor to the line that has “<string>cpus=1 -f</string>”, then press lowercase d twice to remove it. If there are no other <string> lines between the line with “<key>Kernel Flags</key>” and the next <key> line, then delete the Kernel Flags <key> line as well. Save the file by pressing uppercase Z twice.
6) Reboot
7) Launch ActivityMonitor and confirm OSX now sees both cores.

I could not get the Mini to sleep in OSX 10.5.6. The hard drive would sleep, the screen would go off, but the LED’s stay lit and the fan keeps going.  If anyone gets this to work on the 2140 let me know. The wired ethernet adapter doesn’t work either, and I haven’t tested the SD and Express Card slots.

Now on to installing Windows 7:

I chose, again to do this on a USB drive as opposed to burning the DVD.

Next, download the Windows 7 ISo from Microsoft. Extract the files from the ISO using WinRar to a directory on a windows machine of your choice.

Next, log in to a windows machine with admin privileges.

Open a command prompt.

Type “diskpart” in the command line to enter the Disk Partition command line tool, which lets you format and create partitions on active disks.Type “list disk” to reveal a list of all your active disks, each of which is associated with a number. Make a note of which one is your USB key, based on the capacity.

Next, type the following commands, one at a time:

Select Disk # (Where # is the number of your USB disk. We typed “Select Disk 6”)

Clean (removes any existing partitions from the USB disk, including any hidden sectors)

Create Partition Primary (Creates a new primary partition with default parameters)

Select Partition 1 (Focus on the newly created partition)

Active (Sets the in-focus partition to active, informing the disk firmware that this is a valid system partition)

Format FS=NTFS (Formats the partition with the NTFS file system. This may take several minutes to complete, depending on the size of your USB key.)

Assign (Gives the USB drive a Windows volume and next available drive letter, which you should write down. In our case, drive “L” was assigned.)

Exit (Quits the DiskPart tool)

Go back to your command prompt, running it as an Administrator. Using the “CD” command, find your way to the folder where you extracted the ISO files. Your command line path should look something like “C:\Users\USERNAMEHERE\Desktop\Windows 7 Beta\”.

Type the following commands:

CD Boot (This gets you into the “boot” directory)

Bootsect.exe /nt60 L: (where ‘L’ is the drive letter assigned to your USB key from the previous step)

Bootsect infuses boot manager compatible code into your USB key to make it a bootable device.

Copy all of the extracted ISO files into the USB drive. You don’t need to do this from the command prompt. Just drag and drop the files from the “Windows 7 Beta” folder into the drive using Windows Explorer.

Your USB key is now all ready to go!

Plug it into your HP Mini and make sure you enter the BIOS (F10) to temporarily change the boot order to allow booting from the USB drive.   Boot it up and follow the Windows 7 installation, choose the advanced installation, and use the Free space you allocated above in the OSX Disk utility.

Once the isntallation is complete, you should have a nice working copy of Windows 7 on yoru Hp Mini 2140. But wait, how do you get to OSX?

Once you’re in Windows 7, connect to the internet and download the beta 2.0 of EASYBCD. You can find it here:

http://neosmart.net/forums/showthread.php?t=642

Install it, and run it.

Click Add/Remove Entries. Click the little Mac tab towards the bottom.

For Name, enter whatever you want to identify it as OSX

For Mode, choose EFI, and click Add Entry. Click the Save button. Exit and reboot.

You should now get prompted at boot to choose between Windows 7 and OSX. When you choose OSX, just leave it for a few seconds. You’ll see a couple extra text menus with some countdowns. Just let them go, and in a few seconds, you’re in OSX again.

Good luck!