Install Snow Leopard in a Lion partition

Ok, it seems my hypothesis was correct. Cloning worked!

Hi,

You will always be able to install Snow leopard onto your machine, which is what I have managed. Apple do not want you to, but it is possible by partitioning the drive and the booting of connected to another machine in target mode. The other machine need Sri be an older machine with Snow Leopard as the delivery system.

I have used a mac mini that came with snow leopard and installed from that machine snow leopard on an IMac that was shipped with Lion. No problems and you will be able to run you power pd applications successfully on that partition as well as older versions of Aples own applications that do not work with Lion.

Regards,

Tom

This is good to know, Tom, however, I'm wondering about how SL will cope with new hardware that it won't have the drivers for. Presumably, its got the drivers for Thunderbolt, but in the future I'm guessing the Lion machines will have hardware that the SL install won't be able to communicate with.

lzrdoc1 wrote:

I am not at my computer now, but when you boot using Lion, there should be both the Lion and Snow Leopard hard drive partition icons on the desktop. I would anticipate that you should be able to cut and paste between the two.

You can, Finder will let you do anything to the files on both disks, but WARNING: careful how you do it or you'll end up with permissions problems and may not be able to shutdown or startup.

When dealing with files between two bootable disk, two important rules:

1: Only paste INTO a bootable disk when you are booted into; never paste into the other disk. In other words, you can copy (but not Move) from the other disk into the one you're booted into, but not the other way around. If you want to do that re-boot into the other disk first.

AND

2: Never MOVE or DELETE a file on a bootable disk when you're not booted into it. Again, boot into the disk that owns the file you want to move or delete.

Hi Softwater,

I have installed it on machine that was available with SL before Lion was introcued. I would assume that the last SL will include the drivers for all current hardware, but Apple has been very focused on withdrawing support from older hardware and software, so that may not hold into the future. I shall have to review which sofware I really need and start planning up-grades over time and suggest the same for other users.

The failure to support Logic 8 with Lion shows the agressive approach that Apple is taking and how little supprt it provides to users o older hardware or sofware.

Kind regards,

Tom

Thanks for that clarfication, Tom. 🙂

So, i followed T-Bowl's advice, and everything seemed to work, but then i hit a HUGE problem

MY PASSWORD DOES NOT WORK......

i know my password, i use it all the time, my hint even confirms it, but i get rejected each time i try it.

Boots just fine from Lion on the original partition, but it asks me for the password after i finish registering on the SL partition. (i'm running the transfer through my old macbook pro). My password is the same on both computers. Of all the problems i thought i'd encounter while doing this.....

HELP!!

I'm not opposed to a totally fresh install, if i wipe the whole drive it will act as if it's new and will let me set a new password, right?

Wiping the whole drive that's already had Lion on it is not as simple as wiping any other drive. The hidden Recovery partition will not be removed (because Disk Utility doesn't see it) unless you do it this way:

Open Terminal.app, paste the following

defaults write com.apple DUDebugMenuEnabled 1

Press 'Return'

(you can reverse this command later by changing the '1' to a '0' if you wish)

Now open Disk Utility and you should see a new menu in the menubar called 'Debug'. From that menu choose

Show every partition

Now you should be able to see the Recovery partition when you click on the HD drive icon, and view the 'Partitions' tab. Select the Recovery partition in the box, and click the minus '-' sign at the bottom.

BTW, in my attempts to reinstall Lion, I couldn't do it unless I removed the previously installed recovery partition.

Thanks Izrdoc1 for this tip, never thought of it! You just solved my problems!

Forgive me if an earlier post I didn't catch:

To those of you installing SL in a partition on a new MacBook Air that shipped with Lion--how are you connecting the Air to another computer for the initial transfer of Snow Leopard? Without a Firewire port on the Air, I'm stumped.

(And prepared to feel like an idiot if I've missed something obvious.)

Perfect instructions, thanks! Got FCP 7 and ProTools up and running on my new MBP with a Snow Leopard partition. Editing continues on our new Ouja movie... Stay independent.

<Link Edited by Host>

Like paperqueen, I have a new MacBook AIr (with Lion), no firewire port, and I'm hopeful that there's SOME (other) way that I can install SL in a partition so that I can use an essential (Lion-incompatible) program. Any advice would be welcome if this is indeed possible... Thank you.

I just got a new iMac i7, labelled and described by Apple's tech support as a "Lion only machine." I tried t-bowl's step-by-step guide through a snow leopard partition install, and it worked perfectly -- my Lion-only mac has both OS's, and Protools 9 is working fine on the SL side.

it's in the bottom half of the page

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3206761?start=30&tstart=0

Snow Leopard does go a lot slower, my Lion side has a benchmark of 11,850, and the SL side is at 5,500. But still a relief!

A week with my new MBA and still hopeful that there's some way to install Snow Leopard in a partition on this "Lion-only" machine. Although the MBA lacks a firewire port, it does have a Thunderbolt port. Does anyone know if the Thunderbolt could be used to install SL in this method that seems to be working for many of you? And if so, how?! Sorry for my ignorance, but the Thunderbolt is a mystery to me, and I wondered if any of you might know.