How to install Snow Leopard over Lion?

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Level 1

59 points

How to install Snow Leopard over Lion?

Is it possible to upgrade to Snow Leopard if you have Lion on a machine?

In other words, will it migrate the user accounts and save your applications and all of that like any other upgrade?

I know some people that installed Lion and don't like it (yes I suggested trying it on a USB drive first) and want to know if the Snow Leopard installer will preserve everything going Lion -> Snow Leopard.

I am probably going to try Lion myself, but I'll probably use a spare drive to test drive it.

However, I still would like to answer their question without a lot of drive copying and testing if someone has already done this.

If I end up testing it myself I'll try to remember to take notes and post here.

Thanks.

Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.7)

Posted on Jul 20, 2011 5:50 PM

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Answer 1

Jul 20, 2011 5:52 PM in response to cshapple

You cannot install Snow Leopard over Lion.

If you want to go back, you must boot from external media with the Snow Leopard install, erase the disk, and then install Snow Leopard on the disk fresh. You will lose all data, applications, and settings.

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Answer 2

babowa

Level 9

78,103 points

Jul 20, 2011 6:01 PM in response to cshapple

In addition to William's spot on advice, do not install Lion on anything unless you have a (preferrably bootable) backup/clone of your SL system. That way you won't lose anything if you choose to revert back to SL (and, yes, you do have to erase the drive/partition).

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Answer 3

Jul 20, 2011 6:03 PM in response to babowa

Yes, agree with this. If you have the luxury of an external drive (actually, this really isn't a luxury, it's MANDATORY), make a bootable backup with either Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper to an external drive. Test boot with it. Then upgrade that copy, or your internal drive, and be happy. If something goes wrong you can just clone back. Total time: 2 hours for the whole kaboodle.

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