The current Chameleon install procedure assumes that one has already OS X running, with direct access to the boot drive.
With Netbooks that do not have a CD drive, it is a bit complicated to get there first, though.
When I tried this with my netbook, I had to remove the internal drive from the netbook and connect it to my Mac so that I could run the Mac-based installer.
I wonder if others have already worked out ways that can install Chameleon from Windows or Linux instead? Linux may not be too difficult (because it comes with HFS+ support, I believe), but what about Windows?
In my case the Netbook (Asus 1008HA) comes pre-installed with Windows, with an extra empty 60GB "D:" partition. This partition is ideal for installing OS X onto.
Provided one cannot afford to reformat the netbook drive to GPT, this one partition is all the room available for both the Chameleon boot loader, its Extra folder and the OS X installation.
I have a spare external drive (or just an 8 GB USB memory stick) onto which I can write a copy of the OS X Install DVD (using Disk Utility) - and I guess this is for many users the more likely scenario than having an external DVD drive. The plan is now to get Chameleon onto the Netbook, and then tell it to boot the OS X Installer off the USB drive so that installation can commence as usual.
To get Chameleon onto the free partition, it has to be formatted for HFS+ first. I wonder if there are free Windows tools that can do that? (I myself own MacDrive, but I like to find a well working solution for others as well.)
Once that is done, installing boot0 into the netbook's MBR should be easy. But where could boot1h go? AFAIK, boot1h is loaded by boot0 to continue the boot phase, which in turn then locates the "boot" file on the file system, right? Hmm, maybe this goes into the place where the netbook's original bootload was located, overwriting that? That would be the first blocks of the Windows partition, then, I guess. Hmm, that doesn't sound right. Any help?
If I got above right, then the biggest challenge is probably to get the partition formatted as HFS+ and then copy the Extra folder and the boot file onto it.
I guess I could even write a program for Windows (and Linux, if desired) that takes a pre-created HFS+ disk img file, writes it into that partition and adjusts the HFS+ volume size fields to match the partitions size.
Does that all make sense?
