Downgrading from Lion to 10.6.8?

many thanks!

I know I can downgrade, my question is can I migrate all my apps from my Lion backup?

My experience was that the Migration Assistant will *not* work, either from a TM backup or from a clone of your Lion disk. I had to re-install all my apps. I did find that a fair number of them didn't need the serial numbers to be re-entered since this info must be kept somewhere in my home folder (which I had copied directly from my Lion backup).

The biggest problem I had was that my Mail mailboxes could not be back ported to Snow Leopard since the format had been changed by Lion. I think you may be able to export them in Lion and then re-import them back in SL but I ended up just re-initializing my Mail system.

HTH

BTW, I pretty happy with my downgrade. I can now boot my iMac from "bong" to Snow Leopard desktop in 35 secs; it was taking well over a minute to boot in Lion.

One issue you may have if you are an app developer is that the latest version of XCode requires Lion in order to be able to use ARC (auto-ref-counting). This was an irritation to me but I have since discovered that you can install Lion inside of a Parallels virtual machine. I haven't tried it but that should mean that I can run XCode under Lion in a Snow Leopard virtual machine and get around the problem.

If anyone else has tried this it would be nice to know.

OK, I have downgraded to Snow Leopard. Thought I'd post as there where some glitches I had that you can avoid.

Firstly, what a breathe of fresh air to be back on snow leopard. Here's a caveat of why to downgrade:

My wireless connection is faster, my windows now properly come to the front when selected via alt tab. Programmes open instantly rather than the delay that was before. No more jerky windows with full screen, my fan doesn't come on anywhere near as much as it did under Lion. I can "Save As" again! My Library folder isn't sneakily hidden.

To make your downgrade easier, I would recommend the following. Please note that this will not work with machines that came with Lion OS.

1. Clone your current HD (Use SuperDuper!)
2. Check the clone will start up by starting from it via the startup dosk panel in the sytem control panel.
3. Make sure that none of your disks with your data on have been set up with CoreStorage. This caused me a real headache as 10.6 doesn't read 10.7 CoreStorage. If you have you need to copy your data off your disks and reformat as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
   1. Should you be in the situation that you have already downgraded and cannot access your disks try the following:
   2. Go to the App Store and download Lion (don't worry it on't automatically install)
   3. When downloaded close the install dialogue and go to the install file
   4. Control Click and show package contents.
   5. Goto Contents/SharedSupoport/
   6. Copy InstallESD.dmg onto a USB drive (you need at least 4GB)
   7. Install a Trial version of Parallells
   8. Create a new virtual machine pointing to the USB drive. This will install Lion as a VM.
   9. Once installed you can access your Disks. The only issue with this is that Parallels currently doesn't support copying from the VM to the Host. This means that you can only copy files from one external drive to another. However, if you have drives formatted in 10.6 you can connect them and transfer your data from those formatted for 10.7 only.
4. Insert your Snow Leopard Disk
5. Reboot. When the boot up sound comes hold down the 'c' key.
6. Once booted from the disk select the disk utility from the menu
7. Erase your main HD with the OS on
8. Install Snow Leopard!

This does assume that you have all your serials. If all your serials are stored in something like 1Password (a good idea by-the-way), do make sure you have at least the serial for 1password!

I don't get this thread… help me here with this exercise, please!

1. analyse title: 'Downgrading from Lion to 10.6.8?'
2. define 'Downgrading'!
   1. present participle of downgrade
   2. downgrade = to revert software back to an older version

looks simple?! :|

it does, but some people find it to hard to get (it's all about the verb, not the rest of the sentence).

Could you all now have an act of kindness and do one of the following?

• If you want to troll or b1tch about how much you hate Lion and all the following cats, go somewhere else, maybe to some discussion called 'Why do you hate Lion' or 'Is Snow Leopard better then Lion'.
• If upgrade equals reverse of downgrade, then downgrade should be as sweet as an upgrade. Then if you need old serials, reauthorise software or import any backups that isn't a downgrade, you can call that something else (the word 'workaround' is constantly popping in mind. Go guess this?!).
• If in the process of trying to downgrade one needs to format main disk, that's a clean install, do not start your post with Eureka. Go somewhere else, I'm sure you'll find a discussion called "how to install 10.6.8 on 10.7.2 machine".

  define 'clean install':

  • (1) To install an upgrade of an operating system (OS) on a hard drive that already has an OS running off of it without carrying over any settings of the older OS, such as user preferences or information about the hardware and/or the software.
  • (2) To install an OS on a hard drive that does not already have an OS installed on it or a newly formatted hard drive.

Now, did one of you managed to sucefully downgrade from 10.7.x to 10.6.8 without:

1. format main disk
2. that's it: without formatting the main disk
3. read a)
4. read b)

...let us know, we'll be glad to follow your outcome.

Hi casadeferro,

The difficulty is that downgrade can be used in many ways. I do not believe it is as specific as you make it. Downgrade as far as I see refers to getting your mac from; in this case; 10.7.x to 10.6.x. If you are looking for a solution that will allow you to get your mac to 10.6 from 10.7 without reinstalling anything the simple answer is that this is impossible. Each OS X version creates changes to its core system that is incomapatible with other OS X versions. Although apple create a solution for upgrading one version to the next eg 10.6 to 10.7 (and even this process is error prone for many users), they have not and will not create one for going from 10.7 to 10.6 because they don't want you to. What is offered here is a solution that requires some work and knowledge.

We could argue about the semantics, but this will not achieve anything. However, it has been phrased this thread is about getting macs that are currently running Lion to Snow Leopard. There is no such thing as a "10.7.2 machine". Most macs are capable of running whatever version of OS X you install. The trick is in knowing how to install the version you want. There are plenty of forums that will help install whichever OS X version you choose on your machine. The reason this is not straight forward is due to the hardware and software. Installing 10.6 on my system was relatively easy as it originally came with Tiger. Macs that come with 10.7 pre-installed have hardware issues and that requires more specific steps to downgrade to 10.6.

Hope this helps.

Can I get back to the very first question? I am considering buying a new (2012) MacBook Pro instead of upgrading hard disk and RAM on my current MacBook Pro 3,1 which came with Leopard, now updated to Snow Leopard 10.6.8. Running System Profiler shows me a bunch of PowerPC apps, including Microsoft Office, which need Rosetta, but work just fine. The current Office has Feature Bloat, and I suspect thet the newer is even worse (and expensive). I also have Time Capsule backups, a LaCie D2 Quadra v3 1TB (new) and a D2 Quadra v2 500 GB, to either of which I can and will Carbon Copy Clone the current system (Macintosh HD is only 120 GB and I have alrady had to migrate my Aperture 3.2 Library to the v3 Quadra to free-up space)

Can someone from Apple PLEASE tell me if the most current MacBook Pro (quad core i7, 8GB RAM) will run 10.6.8 or not.. Thanks by the way for the note on Time Capsule being ravaged by Lion. I won't be connecting my current one to a new MacBook, but rather get an additional one. (plus a LaCie Little Big Disk RAID for mirroring the new machine's 750 GB HD)

thanks,

Trevor Petcher

I agree 100% with Bowerandy. I work for a largish publishing company but spend most of my time developing these days and Lion has been a nightmare for all the reasons stated. The file sharing is terrible - the lack of AFP access to Windows servers is beyond a nuisance and connecting via SMB is woeful. Even to our XServes the performance is poor compared to SL.

I too have been having problems with Preview - it hangs every time I try to open a freshly taken screen shot.

Performance in general is terrible - constant pauses and freezes - just seems to sit and wait several seconds before deciding whether it wants to do what you've asked. It may well be the versioning as opening and closing docs seems to be the worst affected.

The auto save drives me insane, I create a quick text document to hold some text, close it and then it pops up again next time I open the app. I open a Keynote doc, copy some text, then get the locked warning. I tell it to unlock and then when I close it - without making any changes other than the copy - and it resaves it (A pain when the doc contains video and is several GB is size).

Rosetta doesn't really worry me, I only have a single PPC app that I need and I have 50 other machines here I can use for that.

I'm also having severe issues with web sites crashing - in particular our own site where we get people to submit text and photos via a simple HTML/PHP form. Hard crashes both Safari and Firefox running on Lion but both work fine with SL. IE and Firefox on Windows is fine as well.

Printing has also been a problem for us - several printer drivers were broken with security updates.

I deliberately waited to install Lion as there was no need for us to rush in. The thing that tipped us was iBook Author - we wanted to look what it could do for us. Well the pain isn't worth it.

I ran Lion for 22 days and gave it as good a chance as possible. The downgrade to SL has been the most painful experience I've ever had with Apple products - despite having a TM back and a SparseDisk Image of my SL machine.

In the past there's been OSs I've not particularly liked, but this is the first time I can genuinely say I've hated an OS. This release has truly angered me and I'm usually a 'go with the flow' type guy.

We have 75 employees and many are due for new machines this year. I can categorically say - as I'm the IT manager who makes the decision - that we won't be purchasing any new machines unless we can get an assurance they will work with SL, or unless Lion makes some sort of Lazarus type recovery over the next few months.

As for the roll back - it took nearly two days to get a proper running system back up. I ended up doing a clean SL install on a Firewire drive after doing clones of my running Lion machine. As others have said, your SL Time machine backup is worthless once you've 'upgraded' to Lion. That alone angers me - that there's no warning when moving to Lion that your precious TM backups will be rendered useless.

Anyway, long story short, Clean SL install with same username as previous machine, clone existing Lion drive (just in case everything goes pear shaped), install required software onto clean SL, wipe Lion HD, Clone back, restart. Reconnect TM which should now show your SL backups, decide what you need and copy it all back. I also had to go through migrating 22 days worth of mail from my Lion machine to my new SL install. Painfully slow with large drives...

One word for Lion - abyssmal!

I just finished the downgrade and let me tell you, I am soo happy to be back on SL! Everything just works better, it boots much faster, my Time Machine backups are flawless, Front Row is back and all my other apps work.

Let me warn you about one problem I encountered:

After backing up my data, I tried to boot my Mini from a SL disc but it never worked. They grey screen of death kept appearing. After hours of forum searching I found the answer - You can only boot from the original discs that came with your machine, not a generic copy of SL.

This is a huge concern because if you plan on keeping your SL machine for as long as possible like me then you will need to take great care in keeping these discontinued discs in pristine condition because you will never find them again and it will be impossible to rebuild your machines OS in the future should you ever mistakenly install Lion during an Apple propaganda induced relapse of poor judgement.

I highly recommend you make duplicates of the original discs that came with your computer if you want to preserve SL.

Mind me asking how you accomplished the downgrade?

I have a 21.5 inch iMac that I want to re-install so I can sell it in a clean state. Unfortunately, I lost my original install discs so I called Apple Care (who don't care AT ALL) and they told me that they no longer are able to ship out replacement discs and my only option is to purchase a SL disc on the online store. I ordered a SL install DVD and found that my iMac won't boot from this disc.

So, I called Apple tech support again and was now told that I can't do what they had suggested I do as described above.

I am left *really* frustrated with Apple's arrogance and unwillingness to help. The agent's only response was to point me to the legal agreement for OS X Mountain Lion and he also stated "it's in there somewhere" but couldn't be more specific.

Just go back in this thread to 15th August - you'll find a new thread referenced there which tells you how to do it with an external drive. (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3264421)

But read this thread (15th August) first...

And under that post in THIS thread, you'll find my clarification on how I did it.

I've now downgraded two machines like this, and both are working fine.

The Snow Leopard disc they sell is Snow Leopard 10.6.3, and machines built after that require Snow Leopard 10.6.8 (from memory) to boot - read back and you'll see how to make 10.6.8 out of pieces!

Hi Rev,

I followed your guide - thank you for posting such a helpful walkthrough.

I got to step 8 (your final step) and I'm a bit confused. I now have a Super Duper Backup based on Lion, that I want to somehow use in Snow Leopard. I assume I set it as the startup disk and then restart my machine to restore it... When I do this I get a warning message saying my computer will re-start using my 10.74 backup.

If I restore from that backup, presumably I will end up back on Lion?

What did you do to get all your documents back into Snow Leopard? Did you just copy folder by folder?

I'm less bothered about the applications - if necessary, I'll put them back one by one, but my documents are really important.

Please could you help?

Thanks

Frank

Ziatron wrote:

A lot of people use a Carbon Copy Clone of their boot drive

Most people I know use SuperDuper. Will that also work?

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

Yes but unlike CCC it won't backup the recovery partition, other than that there is little to choose between them.

Have to work on checking the date before posting, 🙂 sorry.

trilogy1000 wrote:

I also had to go through migrating 22 days worth of mail from my Lion machine to my new SL install. Painfully slow with large drives...

One word for Lion - abyssmal!

I got to tell you that I don't really understand all the fuss with the cloning and so on, the only problem I ancountered was the incompatibility between the databases of Mail, AddressBook and iCal between the SL and the Lion.

I chose to clean install the SL (I formated my drive completly - loosing the bootcamp and that stupid Lion hidden partitions). As expected I was thrilled to see the good old familiar face SL, and as everybody here noticed the TM backup I had (of my Lion system as I am using it already two monthes) was worthless in terms of my settings (I didn't try to restore the personal files such as photos, films, documents and so on). I manually copied the user's library from the TM to the desktop of SL and tried to restore my emails. I noticed that it is impossible so I reinstalled the lion and now looking for solutions.

How did you migrate the 22 days worth of emails?

To all those who encountered the same problem as I did i.e returning the databases of mail, adressbook and ical from lion to SL

if you Exprot the mailbox from Lion's mail and then improt it into SL mail it works fine. you get it in an "imported" folder but rearanging it is no biggy.

I exported all of my mailboxes, just don't forget to export each subfolder seperatly as well as the main folder.

then I too some screen capturs of the way it is organised, I imagin it would take few minutes to reorganise everything,

I also took screen captures of the rules as I didn't noticed if they trasplanted properly or not.

with AB and IC it is even easyer, you just export an archive of each and that is that, in SL the imprt works fine.

I think that exporting your safari bookmarks would be a clever thing to do as well.