Can I install Snow Leopard on the new Mac Mini

Hi tjk,

Thats exactly what i was planning to do , first clone stock lion system to another external drive , just in case.

Thanks for your sugestion.

Steve Jolly wrote:

Since I've been the "speedometer keeper" -- if you haven't noticed, this thread has now logged just under 40,000 views.

I dunno why i've found myself on page 20, but Steve if you're reading this, you need to update your speedo 😁

Great continuing work, newfoundglory! For those who still want Snow Leopard (and Rosetta) concurrently with Lion:

I have now put full updated instructions for installing Snow Leopard (and Rosetta) into Parallels 7 in Lion, which now only requires the Snow Leopard Install DVD (and not the Server version):

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1365439

Hey, newfoundglory! I don't know why you were doing an archeological dig back on p. 22 in this Thread -- but, yup! I've been lurking, here, as you and MichaeLAX and others have turned the situation around. Great work, guys! I've noticed MicheaLAX (in particular) has been showing up in various other venues and forums around the Net to spread the word that Rosetta can still work alongside a Lion (even if only in a virtualization cave or living in separate quarters)!

And, of course, my regular "Speedometer readings" became superfluous as it became likely that Apple and Pope Tim weren't going to give us any more of a dispensation than Pope Steve did regarding supporting SnowLep under Lion, regardless of the growing interest in this topic.

However, for old time's sake...

Yes, we did did! 😁 Free the Snow Leopard 83,000!!

(83,000 visits to this thread, so far, and the number keeps growing!)

Nice work, everyone! It's a perfect example of how these Discussions "add value" and utility to Apple's products!

And a quick additional thank-you to MichaeLAX:

I just re-read your updated "summary" post at the MacRumors forum link (listed in your last posting two articles above this).

It's remarkable work: it's a classic in its clarity of expression and completeness (and your patience with occasional misguided, grumpy trolls). I know that other folks, not the least of them being newfoundglory, contributed essential pieces to the solution, but you did the hard work digging up and placing the vital extra pieces in the right order to unmix the puzzle and make that solution widely and easily accessible -- and you had the clarity of vision that moved things inexorably forward until the whole view popped into focus and reality. Wow!

Whatever you do in "real life," if this is any guidance, my guess is that you do it VERY well!

Despite this going back to last year - I have since managed to make Snow Leopard install media for the 2011 mini.

I got hold of 10J4139, which is a build of 10.6.7 which shipped in-box with the 2011 MacBook Pro and also the 2011 iMac as well. I got from a new iMac, so it wasnt even MacBook Pro media; although the builds numbers are in fact the same.

The process is, unfortunately, quite involved as you can imagine. Extracting and modifing files within packages, and then putting it all back together again. Its in fact possible to make 10.6.7 install on pretty much any current intel Mac.

(The process is even more involved if you want to fit the installer on a single-sided DVD, as various bits also have to be removed to reduce its size - which would have to be unwanted languages for example)

I think the process might be a bit too much to explain here, but if you dont have a 10.6.8 image from similar hardware, a "proper" installer of 10.6.7 with the previously described kext patches actually avoids all the problems people have had in this thread.

Do you accomplish that with Packagemater or does it require additional software?

I ask, because I was thinking of likewise simplifying the Snow Leopard install into Parallels 7 (by attempting to eliminate the need for Terminal in the installation steps once the media is created).

Steve: Thank you for your kind words!

Thanks for the plist and kext patches. One minor picadillo on the terminal-permission stuff...the sudo su ~ instruction didn't work on neither the 7/11 mini nor an early 2010 MBP running SL 10.6.8; it accepted the password, but replied with invalid login on both machines. I tried sudo su (without tide) on the mini and VOILA! the permission changes worked fine. The reboot cured all the ailments from before the fixes.

I'm not a Unix geek; I know just enough to get in trouble. I'm sure there's a rational explanation for this in Unix.

Thanks for the recipe. This gathers together nicely how to fix SL so it can function on the later Lion mac minis.

In my case, the mini is the 5.3 mid-2011 Lion server model upgraded to 16GB RAM and the install host is a MBP 6.2 early 2010 model running SL 10.6.8 using the original 10.6.4 install DVD

I'm not thru building and testing, but so far so good....All the obvious ailments RE cursor issues, ghost monitor, catatonic sleep etc. from the pre-fix SL mini install have vanished.

My project is to get Lion client on one HD and SL client on the other HD on my mac mini 5.3 (Lion server):

1) Put mini into target mode and hooked it to MBP. Erased 2nd (empty) mini HD and installed Lion client using MBP DVD drive. restarted Lion clent from mini and applied Lion client updates 10.7.4. (Lion retail client DVD wouldn't install directly to mini using external DVD drive)

2) Installed applications and files onto Lion client HD (in progress....)

3) Backed up both the Lion server and Lion client HDs to disk images on external FW drive.

4) Put mini into disk target mode hooked to MBP.

5) Followed your recipe to erase 1st HD (Lion server) and install SL, starting with 10.6.4 original MBP install DVD from the MBP.

6) Had to use sudo su instead of sudo su ~ to start the terminal fixes; other than that, the recipe worked great!

7) Currently building both HDs with apps and files; only issue thus far is a quirky SL 10.6.4 applications DVD;

1) Worked fine when I originally installed onto the MBP, but when I tried to use it to install appications onto the target disk mini, got an installation error.

2) When I try the 10.6.4 app DVD install directly to the mini SL thru an external DVD player, get a 'can't install on this computer' message.???? I'll keep playing ;-)

I'll respond if any other issues occur in case my travails and solutions can benefit others; this discussion has certainly helped me! I'm well on the way to having a dual SLrosetta classic/ modern Lion, I7 quad, 1.5TB fast HD, 16GB RAM screaming mini!. Thanks again to the SL-on-LionMini contributors!

To contnue...... SUCCESS (so far ;-)

I've had success cloning my entire MBP 6.2 w/MacOS 10.6.8 (early 2010 model; I7 dual core) with lotsa apps and files to a HD on the mini 5.3 (mid 2011 Lion server model.) This approach saved oodles of time and aggravation by not having to reinstall appications, updating browser bookmarks etc. My goal was to replicate the MBP HD content onto the mini and the clone approach seems to work. The process:

1) put the Amis instruction recipe and ketch files (posting #26) onto the MBP desktop.

2) Clean up MBP HD; run software update to insure MBP is up to snuff.

3) Create disk image of MBP on FW external (I used SuperDuper).

4) Transfer MBP image to MBP desktop.

5) Put mini into target mode and hook to MBP.

6) Erase mini HD from MBP.

7) Restore MBP image onto mini HD (SuperDuper) from MBP.

8) Follow Amis recipe from "Installing Snow Leopard" - step 7 to the rest of the SL install and thru the "fix kernel extensions" (Caveat: I had to use sudo su vs sudo su ~ to get super user)

9) Rename computer, disk drive and account full name to distinguish mini from MBP.

All applications open normally, the plist/ketch updates seem to work and all is well so far......

Caveat: As NFG in post#19 states, the SL install should be from a machine with as similar hardware as possible to the target mini. Both the MBP 6.2 and mini 5.3 share the Intel I7 CPU; the MBP with 2 cores and the mini with 4.

I don't know if this approach will work if the mini and host machine are too disparate.

Apologies for butting in at this point but I have been trying to find a solution to my current problem and I am not savvy with command line and going into terminal, unless I have to simply copy paste from instructions! Basically, I have an old Macbook 4,1 model which I use extensively because I use this machine when I am at university (doing my analysis for my PhD in the social sciences- so nothing techi I'm afraid). On it i have all my apps etc, which I need to work with. Unfortunately it is becoming very slow and tedious to work with since I travel a lot between two countries (where I have large monitors in both places since i used to do video editing), I thought that I could buy a Mac Mini. I had tried to transfer the apps to my wife's Mac Air and most of them needed a paid upgrade to function (meaning hundreds of Pounds or Euros), which I opted against. My wife doesn't need all the apps and is happy with the basic stuff, but for myself, I need all the apps that I have on the Macbook. So I would have to opt for a Mac Mini with Snow Leopard on it, so I can keep my old programmes on it. I considered buying an older model of the Mac Mini (the one with the DVD drive still there), right before they started making the newer models. The thing is that the older model costs only a 100 pounds less than the new model, which has all the bells and whiltles. I have to also make sure that whatever I buy can support the use of 2 monitors working as extended monitors, without losing on the resolution -- it is useless having two large monitors with low resolution and everything is much larger onn them, making the monitor real estate uselss!

Now, I know, from reading through this discussion, that I can't clone the Macbook and put it on a new Mac Mini - the hardware / chipset would be different... so WHAT IF I HAD an iMac 27 inch with the lastes SL (10.6.8) to clone? The problem is that the iMac has a 1Tb HHD while a Mac Mini typically has 500Gb. The second problem is that everybody has been talking about cloning a MBP, which unfortunately I don't have available -- so would the iMac be compatible with the new Mac Mini? Can I transfer a clone of the iMac27 to a new Mac Mini and is there a way of reducing the size of the HDD clone of the iMac from 1Tb to 500Gb, say, by choosing what I want to clone? I would be using Superduper or Carbon Copy Cloner, so if one of the two allows you to make a copy of everything minus, say the movies on the iMac, which I dont't want on the mini anyway, is the iMac hardware configuration similar to the one of the latest Mini?

The iMac 27 inch has the following specs: Processor 2.8GHz Intel Core i7, Memory 8 GB 1067 MHz DDR3 and the hardware overview is as follows:

Model Name: iMac

Model Identifier: iMac11,1

Processor Name: Intel Core i7

Processor Speed: 2.8 GHz

Number Of Processors: 1

Total Number Of Cores: 4

L2 Cache (per core): 256 KB

L3 Cache: 8 MB

Memory: 8 GB

Processor Interconnect Speed: 4.8 GT/s

Boot ROM Version: IM111.0034.B02

SMC Version (system): 1.54f36

Finally, of course I need to make sure that the Mac Mini will be able to support two monitors at the maximum resolution possible. I saw in the forum that something also needs to be done on that front (just like for the thunderbolt). The iMac has an ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics with 512 MB of dedicated GDDR3 memory. What would the new Mac Mini model have and will it be compatible for the installation of the clone from the iMac?

IF all of this is technically possible, can somebody help me with the process of how to do it (especially if I have to download packages prepared by able people such as NewFoundglory and others, who seem to know what they are doing? - unlike me, at this point?) -- THANKS A MILLION WHOEVER ANSWERS THIS and gives me a rundown on what I have to do -- I tried to follow the whole forum posts, but there are pages and pages and I did get lost in it - -so if anybody can tell me WHERE exactly I have to go for simple instructions and where to download the Newfoundglory or other kpgs, it would be great.

Apologies for the long post, but I am very nervous at the moment because my supervisors want me to do all this analysis and my macbook can't handle it! -- and I have been going through these forums for 3 days now, which of course, supervisors don't appreciate!

AGAIN THANKS FOR ANY HELP!

I have several suggestions/ observations that may help...

1) The Imac you describe is similar to the Mac mini Lion server model 5.3; both have the I7 quad core CPU; cloning it is worth a shot.

2) I found the Amis recipe on posting page #26 (near bottom) very helpful; it pulls together a lot of info from the discussion.

3) The 5.3 model mini is offered with dual 750GB drives as an option for ~ $100 more...a great bargain.

4) If you reduce the content of your 1TB drive to fit 500 or 750 GB, you should be able to make a disk image that you can try cloning to the mini.

5) I followed the Amis recipe as described in my posting in cloning my MBP 6.2 to the Mac mini 5.3 and was successful; no problems so far.

6) I'm not sure if the mini is up to your graphics requirements; graphics is not its long suite. The 5.3 model mini uses the Intel HD 3000 GPU w/512mb VRAM. Mine is hooked to an older 23" Apple HD display thru the HDMI port @ 1920x1200 and works fine.

Hope this is of some help.....

DrHankus, thanks for the prompt reply and apologies for taking so long to get back to you.

I haven't bought the mini yet, but I doubt i need a server model -- is there another model that has the i7 quad core CPU? The thing is that since I haven't bought the computer yet, I don't want to buy it only to find out that I can't work with it (ie the cloning and all the stuff mentioned in this forum don't work). Then I would have wasted a lot of money for nothing -- and being a student (even if at PhD level) does not really help!

Besides, I am not in the States, so $100 does not really count for much here! It costs a little bit more than a $100 to upgrade to the 750Gb drive. Either way I would think of getting the $750 drive anyway if I bought it.

I know this may be a stupid question for the gurus out there but the Server Mini is only called a server because it comes installed with the Server OSX right? In other words, the Hardware is the same or as specified on the website and I can then install whatever OSX I want, even a non-server SL, right?

RE I7 quad, the 5.3 server model is the only current mini that offers it; I suspect that this summer Apple will refresh the mini line and perhaps offer more CPU options.....

RE Lion server, Yes, you can either replace the Lion server with Lion client as I did (see previous posts) or just not install the server during the installation process and use it as is. You are correct in assuming that the hardware will work without the server software. I tried this and it worked fine. I changed the server software to the client software to save space. I found the Lion client install on eBay for ~ $30.

I modified my 5.3 Lion server mini to work as a dual boot client: Lion 10.7.4 client and newer software on one 750GB drive and Snow Leopard client 10.6.8 (modified per NFG/Amis) and legacy software needing Rosetta on the other 750GB drive. Everything is working well so far.....