The MSI Wind Notebook that I bought came with the HD pre-partitioned. Lucky me because I was able to skip the partitioning step and I didn't need to fuss with the MBR. However I don't own an external optical drive, so I had to use a USB Hard Drive to install OSX86.
The first thing I did was to own a retail copy of Mac OS X 10.5, the family pack in my case. Then before even buying the Windbook, I started to download msiwindosx86.iso. If you don't know what that might be, or how to find it, don't even bother reading the rest of this.
The first boot of the Windbook took a little over a half an hour to finalize the XP install. Once I got the Windbook up and running in XP, I converted the emtpy 68GB partition from NTFS format to free space. This can be done with Disk Management in XP's Computer Management tool.
Next I used another Mac's Disk Utility to restore the iso file to a blank HFS+ formatted USB HD, erasing the contents and restoring as block copy. Now while still using OS X I downloaded Chameleon 1.0.11 and installed it to my newly restored USB HD installer.
Note: There is more than one way to install Chameleon, and I tried 2 different methods before being able to boot from my USB HD. I cant say which one worked because I ran into issues at this stage, and tried several different things.
I also attempted to install from a USB key, formatted exactly like the USB HD but it was too slow. In fact impossibly slow, I waited 30 mins for the OS X installer to load past what is usually a brief initial blue screen. I gave up and went back to my USB HD, which did work when given enough power. I had a special USB cable from another device, that pulls power from 2 USB slots. And that ordeal is why I like firewire, and I'm sad to see it going away on new macs.
At this stage, the USB HD is ready to be booted from. Before installing OS X, I had to use Disk Utility to format the 'free space' partition to HFS+. Then I then I was able to install OS X on that partition of the Windbook's HD. It took about 35 mins to install.
When I first tried to startup OS X I got an HFS+ partition error. I booted from the installer HD again and used fdisk in the terminal to make this new partition bootable. It would be best to read the man page for fdisk on how to do this. I also installed/copied the chameleon bootloader onto the new partition.
I rebooted the Wind again and it worked! The bootloader let me choose my osx86 partition (or XP,) and I'm running OS X on my Wind!
There are only 2 things that I care about that don't work:
1 wifi - huge problem because whats the point of a wired "netbook" ?, but Im going to replace the wifi card with a compatible one.
2 audio out - this also sucks, and there are alot of workarounds available. I have a USB audio out (Griffin iMac - $10 at radioshack) that requires no drivers, so I'll get by until the wind drivers are updated.
I also upgraded to 10.5.5, and had to reinstall certain drivers, but that's a whole different post...
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