After numerous rounds of backing up, installing and restoring the dual boot system, I got my Hackintosh and XP running happily on my Dell Vostro 1500 notebook computer. Many guides on the web telling you how to setup an OSx86/XP dual boot system but most of them require you to reinstall XP. This is not desired for people like me having a production XP system that reinstallation is not an option. I am a newbie to OSx86 and therefore I've spent lots of time on failed trials. This is a really painful process and therefore I decided to share my experience, hoping to help some other new-comers.

To make it brief, your installation process should include these essential steps:

1. Decide what OSx86 distro should be used, based on your hardware configuration.
2. Perform a full backup of your system.
3. Plan your hard disk partitioning scheme.
4. Update BIOS version to A06 and make appropriate settings.
5. Preparation for dual boot via XP bootloader.
6. Install OSx86 with awareness of choosing the right drivers (aka kext).
7. Configure dual boot.
8. Install Vostro 1500 drivers on OSx86.
9. Perform another full system backup to saveguard future OSx86 failover cases.

Do not miss any single step! Mac OS X is supposed to be installed on Apple hardware only and therefore any attempts to install Hackintosh are risky. Many people already said that they have reinstalled their osx86 for more than 10 times to make it works, this is exactly what I did.

Hardware configuration

Model - Vostro 1500
CPU - Intel(R) Core 2 Duo T7250 (2.0GHz/800MHz FSB, 2MB L2 Cache)
LCD Panel - 15.4" inch Wide Screen SXGA + TFT Display with TrueLife
Memory - 2GB (2x1024) 667MHz dual-channel DDR2 SDRAM
Video Card - NVIDIA(R) GeForce TM 8600M GT with 256MB DDR2
Hard Drive - 160GB (7200 RPM) SATA
Network Card - Broadcom 440x 10/100 Integrated Controller
Wireless Card - Intel(R) Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN
Optical Drive - 8X CD/DVD+RW combo drive
Sound Card - SigmaTel 9205
Battery - 85 WHr 9-cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery
Bluetooth - Dell Wireless 355 Module with Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR Technology

Before you start, get these tools

1. iPC OSx86 10.5.6 Universal PPF5 Final v1.1 PPF patched DVD
2. Clonezilla Live CD/USB (or any other ghost tools)
3. GParted Live CD/USB (or any other partitioning tools)
4. Backup media (I use external USB hard drive)
5. Dell Vostro 1500 BIOS A06 updater
6. XP or Windows 7 installation DVD

Choice of OSx86 distro

Currently, there are so many OSx86 distros made. To name some, Kalyway, iAtkos, Leo4all, Jas, iDeneb, iPC. Not all of them will be suitable for your hardware. For example, at the time of writing, iPC (with vanilla kernel) is the only distro that works with Vostro 1500 featuring a stable 10.5.6 OSx86. There is no workable solution for 10.5.7 yet. [Update: I can upgrade from 10.5.6 to 10.5.7 using Apple's Software Update] I've tried Jas, iDeneb and Kalyway and they simple cannot boot up after installation. The OSx86 Project community is maintaining an awesome hardware compatibility and incompatibility list for various OSx86 versions. You should check out this list as the very first step to decide which distro should be used for your system. Randomly picking up a distro is just a waste of time - lots of time!

Back up your system

Get Clonezilla Live, burn it into a CD or create a bootable USB as instructed at their official site. I prefer the CD version because the USB version requires installing some additional packages.

With your backup media ready, boot up with Clonezilla and choose "savedisk" with default options to backup your system. It could take a long time, once the process is initialized, go and get a cup of coffee.

Plan your hard disk partitioning scheme

This is the most complicated part of the installation process. Any wrong decisions made here will result failover, which takes very long time. You won't know it's wrong until you found that you cannot dual boot the system, or even it cannot be booted up at all!

Dell Vostro 1500 has Vista pre-installed on the machine, along with several utility partitions. You can only create up to four primary partitions and Dell eats them up! I've replaced Vista by XP because it sucks when first deployed. At that moment, I let the DellUtility partition (sda1) remains on my hard disk, created another primary partition sda2 for XP boot partition, and created an extended partition sda3 (in which use up another primary partition quota) for other logical drives. Other Dell partitions were removed because I found listening to music without booting up an OS is useless.

As a failed trial, I've created another primary partition for OSx86 using GParted Live.  I prefer GParted to Partition Magic because GParted is free, and it includes a very useful utility TestDisk - which can restore your corrupted partition table when something goes wrong. Unfortunately, the newly created partition was numbered sda4 because sda3 is already in use. After installing OSx86, the whole partition table got messed up. I can see the drives under OSx86, but the partition table is partially corrupted. It cannot be modified by any disk partitioning tools anymore. Diskpart from XP recovery mode does not detect any partitions too. Now I can only boot up OSx86 with the install DVD, and I cannot access my XP anymore.

After surfing the web, somebody suggests that the OSx86 partition must be primary, cannot be located (or having a drive number, sda4 in my case, although sda3 is physically located before sda3) after any extended partition, and even cannot be located "far away" from the first sector of the disk.

Since XP and OSx86 must be using a primary partition (OSx86 on logical partition is feasible, but I suspect that the system will be unstable because DiskUtility cannot display the disk structure correctly), I decided to go with this partition structure:

Partition table type: MBR by default (do not use any other type, including GPT)
sda1: DellUtility primary partition - Dell OEM partition type (aka 'fe' flag if you use Linux fdisk)
sda2: XP primary partition (with boot flag on) - ntfs
sda3: OSx86 primary partition - fat32 (will be changed to hfs+ later)
sda4: Extended partition, containing sda5 and sda6
    sda5: XP data drive - ntfs
    sda6: Shared data drive for XP and OSx86 - fat32
    
You should not make sda3 as hfs+ at this moment because OSx86 installation sometimes won't recognize it. And I found that I have to format it under XP before installing OSx86. sda6 is using fat32 because OSx86 cannot write into ntfs by default, denying you to share files between the two OS. You can easily create/delete/shrink/grow/move partitions with any filesystem types using the GParted graphical user interface. Feel free to do so because you have already backed up your drive.

Since my old structure was sda1 (Dell), sda2 (XP), sda3 (extended), sda5,6 (data logical drive), I have to remove sda5, sda6 and then sda3 completely in order to create a new sda3 for OSx86 and make sure that it is not named sda4. I am forced to delete sda5,6 and therefore I am not moving it. Data will be lost and I have to reclaim the data using Clonezilla's 'restorepart' function. If you are forced to delete logical drives like me, please make sure you are using advanced options on Clonezilla to make sure that your are not touching anything about MBR and partition table when restoring partitions!

After all, boot up XP and quick format sda3 into fat32 and setup a sensible label. If you don't do this, DiskUtility might complains when trying to Erase partition into hfs+ during OSx86 installation.

I ran into problems of unmatched filesystem and partition size. sda5 was growing from 20GB to 25GB on the partition table, but XP told me that it's still having a size of 20GB. In this case, you could make use of diskpart's undocumented "extend filesystem" command on the appropriate partition. Now sda5 should be having a new 25GB size. Please be reminded that boot drive and pagefile drive cannot be expanded. In my case, I have to remove pagefile on sda5 before expanding it.

Configure BIOS

Download BIOS version A06 updater from Dell. My factory default A01 sometimes caused kernel panic  for iPC installation boot up. Make sure that Flash Cache Module is disabled in the BIOS. I've left everything else untouched. I am using SATA mode of ATA rather than AHCI too. Lots of people suggested that you must use AHCI, but I succedded with ATA mode. AHCI is not an option for me since it screwed up my XP.

Preparation for dual boot via XP bootloader

Configure XP boot options using these steps:

1. Download "chain0" and copy it to C:

2. Open command prompt to modify permission of C:boot.ini
    > C:
    > cd
    > attrib -r -h -s boot.ini
    > notepad boot.ini (add a line C:chain0="Mac OS X86" at the bottom as described on the download link)
    > attrib +r +h +s boot.ini
    > exit
    
XP boot loader should be able to boot your OSx86 after you installed the OS.

Install iPC 10.5.6. PPF5 v1.1 PPF

For Vostro 1500, make sure that you've applied v1.1 PPF to the iPC OSx86 10.5.6 Universal PPF5 Final DVD and then boot with it. When the Darwin bootloader shows up, press F8 to enter "vanilla -v" as boot options. Default kernel will not work (because of duo CPU, neither cpus=2 flag works), you must use vanilla kernel. "-v" means to print debug messages during installation startup. If anything goes wrong, you could make use of the debugging messages and search on the web for solutions. If your first boot up went wrong, you should use "vanilla -v -x" in the subsequent tries. "-x" means to clear any cache from previous boot up, if available. Probable reasons for failed installation boot up would be partition table structure, wrong BIOS configuration, or unpatched iPC DVD. I suggest you to remove any external devices during the installation process too.

With some lucks, you will see the installation graphical user interface. Choose DiskUtility on the Utility menu after accepting the user agreement. Make your OSx86 partition using these steps:

1. Make sure that you are using MBR partition type by clicking on the disk, choose "Partition" and verify the information at the bottom. If it is not MBR, or DiskUtility cannot even detect the disk, you did something wrong on the partitioning step.

2. Choose sda3, which is fat32 and colored grey, click Erase and erase it using "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" type. After you finish, sda3 should become black in color. Quit the DiskUtility and you should see the newly created drive on the main screen to install OSx86.

3. Halt! When you see the "Customize" option, you must choose the PS2mouse and PS2keyboard kexts there in order to make first boot successful. I suggest you to select the AppleBCM440X kext (for ethernet card) too. Otherwise you have to download the drivers (kexts) on XP, place it on the shared fat32 data drive and then install it on OSx86 in order to make Internet connection works. Choose OSxTools application to facilitate future kext installation too.

4. Optionally install all other drivers now. I prefer to do it after the first boot because OSx86 installation might fail! It takes time to repeatedly locate and select them at each trials. Do not install any NVidia drivers at this step because it prevents normal system sleep/restart/shutdown. You would like to have the driver installation and system initialization successful (which requires restart) before installing the video driver.

5. Go ahead for the installation.

Now OSx86 should be ready on your notebook computer. Darwin bootloader will replace XP's MBR boot entry. Never mind, it should be able to detect your XP installation and you can choose to boot XP by hitting a key when it offers you to do so.

Boot into OSx86, press F8 to enter "-v -f" option for the first boot. "-f" will recalculate package cache and you will need to do it only once. Subsequent boots can just use the normal option.

After checking that OSx86 is functioning, you can go ahead to configure alternate dual boot method, in case that you don't like the darwin bootloader or if you want to let XP as the default boot option.

Normally darwin should let you boot up XP and/or OSx86 when finishing the previous step. You won't get chain boot error or "boot0: error" if you were following my partition table scheme and had prepared for XP dual boot as mentioned above.

If darwin bootloader went wrong, your disk's boot record is corrupted. Boot up with a fdisk-capable disk and type "fdisk /mbr", then follow the steps in the next section to make XP partition bootable. Alternatively, you could boot up using Windows 7 install DVD, enter recovery mode and then choose the automatic recovery option. This method may not works if your partition table is corrupted. In this case you need to boot up with GParted Live CD, enter command mode and invode TestDisk trying to recover your partition table.

Configure dual boot

Optionally to configure XP to be the boot partition using one of these methods:

1. GParted method. Just boot with GParted Live CD and then select XP partition, right click and choose "Modify Flag" and activate the boot flag. Now the boot flag of the OSx86 should be gone.

2. XP install DVD method. Open command prompt on the recovery menu,
    > diskpart
    > list disk (you should find your disk's number n)
    > select disk n
    > list partition (you should find your XP partition's number n)
    > select partition n
    > active
    > exit

Install OSx86 Vostro 1500 drivers

You need to install Vostro 1500 kexts as described in the InsanelyMac forum (reply 286 by digitalia). Some of the kexts are available on the iPC DVD, and some of them could be downloaded on the web. Be awared that some of the kexts are not necessary, and you can install only one driver among the same category. For example, you cannot install two kext for video cards. Intel 4965 wireless driver is still not fully functioning yet.

QE/CI is not functioning without installing NVidia kexts (you could see how it doesn't work when dragging a window). However, if you install any NVidia drivers, you will get into troubles with sleep/restart/shutdown. This is a well-known problem and is not fixed yet.

Finally...

Don't forget to perform a full system backup again. You will admire this when you screwed up your OSx86 somehow.

Hopes that this guide helps and thank you very much!