I recently have been thinking about the sudden surge of Netbooks we have seen and how nice it would be to have such a portable device with great battery life.  The recent realization that my Macbook Pro’s battery in one year has become barely able to get through a single hour and a half class made this clearer than ever that big, powerful laptops have their place but are not a catch-all.  So, after some eBay hunting, I found a sweet deal on an Acer Aspire One:

2.3 Lbs, 6-cell battery for a rated 6 hour battery life, Intel Atom 1.6Ghz Processor, 1GB RAM, 8.9″ Screen

Clearly, not a speed demon but powerful enough for most non-gaming or video needs…

It ships with Windows XP Home on it, which I promptly decided I was going to wipe and set up XP Pro to dual boot with OS X.  However, this Netbook, like most, does not include a CD drive…so it was off to the fun world of USB drives!

After some hunting, I found a great guide on the Aspire One User Forums, which are my primary resource for help with this device. http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=8151

Basically, it involves making a flash drive bootable and then copying over the contents of the XP install disc so that you can boot off of it and preform the install.  Once I had that all set, I grabbed the drivers off of Acer’s website and got my XP install all set.  At this point, I needed to shrink my XP partition which I decided to do by downloading Hiren’s boot disc (google it) and using another set of tools to make my flash drive bootable again with the Hiren’s disc image.

A key to having a dual-boot OSx86 install is to make sure you partition it as well as formatting it because the MacOS installer can’t format free space on a volume.

Having done all of this, I started preparing with the actual tools for installing OS X.