Can I install Snow Leopard on the new Mac Mini

MathGeekRob, it's interesting that your SL score is almost double that of mine and John Fair's - I wonder if that's due to your having double the RAM? Well, it's a mute point for me now as I have returned my Mini as unusable as a replacement my aging G5. Although the native apps ran tolerably well in SL, some of my old PPC programs such as Adobe GoLive CS were very unstable. Instead, I've just ordered a refurb 13" MBP which still ships with SL. I'll partition and add Lion so that it can serve as my bridge to the future and as a backup to my G5 should it keel over. I'll install a larger & faster HDD and put the original one in an OWC Express enclosure for portable backup. I've never been able to justify a laptop in the past but this solution will give me some all round flexibility. Maybe when third party software catches up with Lion, and the latter gets refined, I'll try the Mini route again!

Add me to the list of "successful" SL installations that are running slow as molasses. Oh, and my second display does nothing while hooked up to the Thunderbolt port...

Geekbench scores:

2011 Mac Mini Server in stock trim:

Geekbench 64 bit = 9509

Same machine after upgrading to 8 gigs of RAM & swapping the boot drive w/ an OWC SSD:

Geekbench 64 bit = 3069

.....weak.....

1/3 the speed & lack of TB port is not worth running SL. I will be reinstalling Lion tonight, I guess... Maybe there will be hope with 10.6.9 if it comes out? I truly just do not like Lion at all.

So, just to take the other side, here...

Yes, I'm certainly retaining Lion on a partition on my new Mini (i7 dual with 8 GB Ram and the Radeon), and with a few updates I'm sure that I'll gain some satisfaction with improved Lion reliability, etc.

On the other partition, I'm quite content to live with Snow Leopard getting scores similar to what MathGeekRob is getting -- for the things that I need to run under SL. Point being, it's slow as **** compared to the Lion partition, but it's tolerable compared to scores on the last-generation Mini or on many of the older machines from, say, a couple of years ago (excepting a well-fitted-out Mac Pro, obviously!).

On balance, it's what it is: it's a crutch, and crutches are just to get you places that you have to be. I can still use some software I otherwise would have lost the use of, and it runs less well than I would have liked, but it's tolerable (and better than I would have had not many years back!). I can live with that, even if I'm disappointed. Plus, we may be able to find hacks, soon, that will make SL run better.

I'm glad we still have a crutch, and many thanks to John Fair for showing us how to find the crutches and unlimber them. And my thanks to all of you -- to everyone for their contributions that got us here!

I success to install SL on my mid 2011 Mac Mini, duo core i7.

The host Mac is a Early 2011 MBP 13" 2.3G i5 which comes with 10.6.7, I install with a retail vesion of 10.6.3, on reboot - hang - I do not have a "restore disc"; with my MBP, then I insert the "installer disc" and it works well.

Thanks

As people do this install, please report back here as to how things behave, especially after a few weeks go by. And ESPECIALLY if you find a fix/hack/workaround to something that was broken or functioning badly.

Like several of you have reported I too have problem with low performance on the MM Server i7 with 10.6.8 installed.

Everything works, but it seems like I just get a quarter of the CPU performance when I run Xbench. The same for PHP apps being executed. Could it be that only one core is being used?

There seems not to be a simple solution, but one of my thoughts about this is to use some of the techniques that are being used by the osx86 community. There seems to circulate modyfied kernel extensions that adds support for sandy bridge equipped systems. More at tonymacx86. I haven't tried any of these yet, but I plan to if not someone else does it before me.

The disturbing thing is that I get full speed when I run the same OS on my MBP i7, but not on the mini. So there must be som small difference between the two processors that the OS does not handle.

Any suggestions for a solution is greatly appreciated.

Great posting, Karl!

What you've summarized is exactly what many of us are exploring:

we know that the system should work under Snow Leopard, and in fact it does, but at a fractional speed;

the speed is fast enough to allow some useful work to be done in SL, but it certainly could be much better;

it seems clear that Apple has not implanted a "poison pill" totally killing off Snow -- I accidentally typed "Slow" ;-) -- Leopard in the 2011 Mini;

and so, it's likely that there are some kernel patches or other "fixes" that will dramatically speed up SL on the 2011 Mini(s) and allow us to run SL-dependent software, including Rosetta.

Many of us are in "dual boot" situation, now -- SL on one partition, Lion on another.

This is now in the court for coders who are a lot better at parsing instructions than I am. If we can get this in front of some really insightful people, my best guess is that we're only days away from a solution that would please a lot of users and add big pile of new 2011 Mini buyers to Apple's lists. I've helped solve a similar problem, previously, but I don't know the instructions that call i5/i7 cores into use and drive effective multithreading, or how to add them into SL, so I'm in over my head and treading water. And, optimistic!

How to get an answer? -- well, the hero will be whoever posts some pointers to this problem in enough places that it finally gets someone's attention -- someone who can and will parse the OS code and find a way forward. They're working on it in other forums -- such as MacRumors.com, 123MacMini.com, and elsewhere.

I'm a little confused. The RETAIL disc I have for Snow Leopard is 10.6.3. Would I still have to go about the same process through TDM with a hsot computer? Or Would I skip switching out the disks?

I have attempted to boot from the disc and the mini install just hangs at the Apple splash screen. Nothing spinning whatsoever.

Steve Jolly wrote: Quite a few of us need some of the capabilities of Snow Leopard that are (for right now, anyway) lost in Lion.

Which capabilities are missing for you?

What other capabilities are missing for others?

To follow up on my previous postings: I returned my Mini as unusable running SL and ordered a refurbished early-2011 13" MBP / 2.7GHz / i7 / 4GB instead. Although advertised as loaded with SL it actually came with Lion. Went ahead and partitioned the HDD, successfully installed SL. GeekBench scores (32-bit): SL=6912, Lion=6886. My old PPC and Universal apps run perfectly. FWIW this seems to confirm that the new Mini definitely has some unique architecture which hobbles SL and which was not present in the early-2011 MBP - the latter designed to run SL but upgradable to Lion.

William Donelson wrote:

Which capabilities are missing for you? What other capabilities are missing for others?

William, I won't go into great detail on this reply, since it's detailed at various points in the hundred or so previous posts from other users, but --

My personal "wish list" for things that could someday run better in Lion (but for now, for me, need Snow Leopard) begins with my "used daily" software such as Final Cut Studio 3 and continues all the way back to having Rosetta available for the very few legacy apps that we neanderthals have some money (and working files) invested in. I appreciate Lion and am using it daily on two of my machines, but I use my Mini for serious work in a highly-mobile situation (otherwise I'd tote my big i7 Pro along) where a MBP won't help me; I've installed two big fast drives in my i7 Mini and taken it up to 8 GB (and soon to 16 GB) of RAM plus some other upgrades, and Snow Leopard as an option would be very handy in some frequently-encountered circumstances.

Also, as outlined in the last few postings directly above, there are still come common stability and interface issues that need, for now, to be sorted out in Lion. I'm not rejecting Lion, certainly -- just needing some of the capabilities of Snow Leopard and trying to get SL to function, for now, on the Mini at an acceptable speed. We "AngloTexians" are apparently all a backward people who can't deal well with the future... ;-)

SJ / Houston / Atlanta / Boston

And an appeal for help from super-experts like Niel (who posted on a related thread):

I hope that you'll get involved in the main thread here (Snow Leopard on the 2011 Mac Mini), and contribute from time to time. Progress on that issue (getting SL running at an acceptable speed on the Mini) is very possible if the most knowledgeable contributors in the Support Community can point some great coders and lurkers toward the topic. And, it's not a minor thing: Lion still has various problems handling some of our most important software (in my case, FCP Studio 3), and the latest high-end Minis offer some tantilizing potential solutions to the price/portability/power dilemma that many of us face in the current slowed-down economy.

Why I'm aiming this at Niel: the level of his contributions in Support Community / Discussions is astounding (over 150,000 points and rising) and the time and knowledge that Neil and others like him contribute, here, makes a huge difference! Getting a few folks like him involved with us in finding answers can move this SL / new Mini situation forward. And, remember, there are ongoing discussions and efforts in other venues (MacRumors, 123MacMini, etc.) aimed at getting some code patches together that will allow the 2011 Minis to run Snow Leopard at non-Snow-Snail speeds.

Yes we can can! 😁

Add me to the "success" list thanks to John Fair's original instructions and lots of excellent reading in this thread. My Mini arrived two weeks ago. It is an i7 with 8 Gigs of RAM. Thanks to this forum I made a Super Duper copy of the Mini as it was out of the box after user configuration as a backup just in case. I used an early 2011 MBP as my base machine. I had already upgraded it to Lion from the App Store so I had to wipe and retreat to SL 10.6.8 in order use this workaround for bringing the new Mini back to SL. My SL base disk was ordered as a SL "Family Pack" as soon as SL was released, so it holds SL 10.6.0. My MBP's "Recovery Disk" is 10.6.4 because it is fairly new.

On my first try I got lazy in the final stages of configuring the re-provisioned Mini and used a Time Machine backup to import "settings" from an older (circa mid-2010) Mini that I was replacing with the new factory Lionized Mini. After the Time Machine settings restore the new Mini (trying to now run SL) just hung when booting. So I wiped the drive and started over. The second time I typed in all the new config info and so far all seems to be going well with the new Mini now happily running SL 10.6.8. I haven't had time to use it enough to encounter any problems such as some discussed here or notice a dramatic decrease in response time. I'll post again after some use and experience.

One question though...I also bought a new i7 MacBook Air about a month ago and would love to get it back to SL, but with no ability to use FW and Target Disc Mode, I guess I'm stuck unless I can manage a similar downgrading process using Super Duper. I also captured it's drive in its brand new System 7 state that I can boot from., so at worst I can create an SL bootable partition on an external drive and just boot the Air to it if I want to run it on SL. But it would be nice to have SL on its Flash Drive native. Any insight would be appreciated.

Things seem to be running OK. The only problem I have encountered so far is that the external USB DVD Superdrive purchased from Apple along with the MacBook Air which had worked in the new Mini running Lion before rebuilding with SL now does not work. It seems to get power and try to read the DVD as I can hear it navigating the disc but it does not "mount" and show on the desktop and hence I have lost acess to easy install of DVD-based siftware. I can, however, still boot the Mini from the MBP in TDM and copy over the install disc image to install, so not an insurmountable problem. I tried looking at the SL System Preferences on the Mini for CD's and DVD's and it does not show a config choice for "open with Finder"...only "Ignore" or specific apps or scripts. But on the MBP running the same 10.6.8, this option for "open with Finder" is still available in the preferences pane for CD's and DVD's

It's funny, the downgraded new Mini does have no problem powering up and mounting (via USB or FW) external mini-drives, it just won't mount the Apple USB superdrive. I have an older USB/FW Pioneer external drive in a box somewhere that I used to use on an older Mini that had a Matshita internal drive which sucked. I'll dig it out and give it a try and report back. In the meantime, maybe some expert here will point me to a solution. Thanks!

BTW, it is great to have Front Row back as I used my older Mini as a media center for iTunes and EyeTV program playback and now the new Mini running SL can do the same...even better, in fact as it has an HDMI out port for the Sony HD TV and the older Mini needed a Mini Display Port to HDMI adapter.

Can you please run a Geekbench score and compare to what it was/is in Lion ? You can find results of your Mini on the Geekbench website.

I still hope that there is some software/hardware combo which works without the 60% performance penalty.

Most likely discs from a Snow Leopard MBP that has the same cpu and the same graphics as the Mini ?