After deleting my last blog, I noticed that some people were trying to access my tutorial on how to make a hackintosh out of the s10e Ideapad from Lenovo. Unfortunately I did not backup my last blog so here is a quick rewrite of the last article. After following this quick how-to you will have made yourself a small Macbook Nano running SL 10.6.2 out of your S10e (cat not included).

First things first

This is NOT my work! I was just following instructions on the great s10lenovo.com message board. Member Vanii there made it incredibly easy to transform your s10e into a fully functional hackintosh.

Though I have already sold my S10e Hackintosh and got myself a Macbook Pro I would recommend everyone who does not have a need for a display that is greater than 10” while being on the go to consider buying yourself a netbook. Netbooks are very portable and powerful enough to get along with the average tasks of your everydays’ office workflow. If you are a student a netbook might probably be enough to get you through university unless you have to do a lot of your hacking/paperwork directly AT university. At home you can connect it to a bigger display and that’s where students do most of their paperwork anyway. And of course you might be able to save about 500-600 gold compared to the price of a low end macbook.

Effectively the s10e’s small screen-size was inconvenient for me because I wanted to be able to do a lot of programming work while sitting in the library at university but you have to see for yourself while enjoying the great apple mac os on your netbook.

What you will need for this how to:

• a s10e lenovo netbook
• uprade to 14CN94WW-firmware or higher (if you have to upgrade, do this from within windows. It is incredibly hard if you try it from a machine that is not running windows)
• access to a working mac or mac os installation (I installed it from a 10.5.6 hackintosh the first time)
• a 8gb usb stick
• snow leopard installation dmg (you can get this by sailing all the way to pirate bay. Buy a real copy though, it is the law)
• vanii’s snow leopard enabler (current version while writing this article is 1.13)

Let’s get started

Before you can prepare the Usb-Stick to boot the Snow Leopard installer you have to scan your Snow Leopard -Installation dmg for recovery. You can do this from within the disc utility application that comes bundled with mac os (Images -> Scan for Recovery). This will take some time but otherwise you won’t be able to restore the installer to your usb-stick.

After that you have to format your Usb-stick.  From within Disk utility format it to “1 Partition” and select Master Boot Record, format it Mac OS Extended (Journaled). You can name this partition the way you like it. Then press apply. This will take some time again.

After your Usb-Stick ist formated go to the Restore tab and define your scanned Snow Leopard dmg as Source and your Usb-Stick as Destination. Check “Erase Destination” and hit “Restore”.

After that you have to install the enabler to your usb-stick. This will make the stick bootable. After that you will be able to install Snow leopard from your usb stick.

Just shutdown your S10e and boot it from the stick (Press Fn+F11 on boot up to enter boot menu). The installation will take some time. Afterwards you will have a working Snow Leopard system. To enable Deep Sleep you have to turn of f “Use secure virtual memory” in Security Settings in the System Preferences. That’s it. You are running Snow Leopard. To install 10.6.2 just reinstall the enabler to your Mac OS system partition and reboot.

After that you can upgrade via Combo Update 10.6.2 from Apple’s Homepage and everything should be fine and look something like this.

That’s it!

Everything works the way it should right out of the box. Only issues I experienced:

• Internal mic is not working. You can connect a headset though.
• Mirroring does not work when attaching an external monitor. Extending another display does. I had an Samsung Syncmaster 245B attached running a 1920×1080 solution.
• after waking from sleep you might experience that your hackintosh writes “00000000000….” into textfields as if you were holding “0″ on the keyboard. You can hit space when that happens, then the output stops and everything is back to normal.
• The Intel Atom processor is not able to support 64bit applications. that won’t bother you as long as you are not installing some development tools like mysql and stuff like that. You can follow snow leopard instructions for the non intel macs on blogs when you run into problems. Took me 2-3 days to figure this out while trying to get the mysql-gem for ruby 1.9 to run…

Congratulations to your Macbook Nano! Have fun!

P.s.: I am aware of the fact that SL 10.6.3 is out already. I just don’t have experience with it on a s10e. Visit the S10lenovo-board to find out if you might run into problems with your Ideapad hackintosh.