Dual Boot on a MacBook Pro
Hi, my early 2011 MBP is currently running OS 10.13 High Sierra. I want to run OS 10.6 Snow Leopard (which came with the machine). My HD is 500 gb SATA. How do I set up a dual boot drive? Thanks for the help.
MacBook Pro
Hello, bumm.
It's a process.
Start by making a full backup of your current system to an external drive. Use Time Machine or a clone utility like CarbonCopyCloner. Personally, I'd use CCC and make the ext drive bootable. Then I'd do the following after restarting from that.
• Erase and reformat your internal drive. Create two partitions, call one "Snow Leopard HD" and the other "High Sierra HD".
• Clone your ext hdd back onto "High Sierra HD" partition.
• Dig out the OS reinstall DVDs that came with your Mac and use them to reinstall Snow Leo onto the "Snow Leopard HD" partition.
That should be it. You can choose which OS to boot at startup by pressing the option-key as you boot the Mac.
EDIT - It seems to me that you may not wish this to be permanent, so you might just reinstall Snow Leopard onto an external HDD and use that to boot from when you want/need to use SL. It would be much easier and faster to set that up than to do what I've outlined above.