From Lion to Snow Leopard - the REAL EASY way

Thank you! Thank you! I loathe Lion!! I don't like the appearance, I don't like the way email & Address Book look & I don't like losing the apps. that I normally use. I have updated every Mac OS, & I've never had my apps deleted before so it never occured to me that this would happen. From now on I will be sure and check before I buy. I am going to follow your procedure & hope it works for me. Many thanks for your post!

1000000000% agree!!!! I reverted to SL after few days of using lion. I've felt system downgrade as upgrade.

Big sigh of relief!!.. All is good. I'm so happy to have SL back.

Hi nuno1959. I have to agree with everything you've said about the new Lion. I've searched all over for advice like yours because ever since I installed Lion, its done nothing but ruin iMovie, made apps disappear or just act 'wierd', made it really confusing to save files, etc... I've had this new OS for about 2 weeks and have tried reverting to Snow Leopard and had no success. So finally I tried your suggestion to restart from the Snow Leopard disc, holding down the "c" key. I got as far as the installer asking me to choose a drive, but it won't let me select my hard drive! How did you get past this? I noticed you mentioned the disk utitlity. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Once you have started from your Snow Leopard disc, you go directly to the disk utility in the menu bar. Choose to erase your hard drive, then you will be able to install Snow leopard. Obviously you will lose everything on your hard drive so be sure you have everything backed up. You need to install from a Time Machine backup that was before Lion. Below is part of a post from earlier instructions.

"Look for Utility / Disk Utility, format / erase the HardDrive,

Then quit the Disk Utility (Command + Q) which returns you to install sequence.

Then proceed until you're asked to use Time Machine."

Hope this is clear enough. I followed previous instructions with my heart in my mouth but it all worked.

I'm also having to return to SL, with LION my Yamaha n8 doesn't work!! Yamaha doesn't have the right updates.... Can you really get back all your itunes music, vids and photo's with time machine? All my kids photo's (4000_) and more than 10.000 track are on my imac, i really can't lose those! If there's only the slightest risk that i could loose them, i won't follow this procedure.... i think.

All I can tell you is that it worked for me. I suggest you read all of the posts. That's what I did, & followed the instructions that were the clearest to me. If you have your files backed up on Time Machine you should be fine. If you are still nervous about losing your treasure trove, I would burn those files to disc or an external drive before you do anything.

I can't think of anything else that would work any better. Hope this helps. Colleen

During the re-installation of SL the time machine drive wasn't fóund, only the mac HD was to be selected. I Checked the drive with disk utility and it was fine. The time machine is still Lion, according to another experienced user, and doesn't work with SL to restore the entire system. I've tried several times to restore a complete backup with disk utility from time machine, but even after succesfully completing this, the iMac won't reboot.

So then i completely installed SL from the install dvd, tried to use the migration assistant. Again time machine wasn't recognized by this program. The system does recognize the time machine drive, i can use the data of the backups, but i haven't checked that fully. My music, photo's and vids seem to be there...

Meanwhile, although i recently bought Lion, Apple support won't assist me anymore, because they only support upgrades, and not downgrades, as they told me literally.

So now i am completely in the dark here as how to restore to SL from my time machine. I mean this is why i installed time machine in the first place. Any ideas?

Here is a quote from the post that I followed. "

Make sure you do a clean install of Snow Leopard. Do you know what a "clean install" means? ***

Also, assuming you did a clean install, and opted to import Account from TimeMachine, did you go back to a time before you did the Lion transition?

*** Clean Install = Insert Original install disk, Access Disk Utility (from top menu bar), Perform a Disk Erase ensuring the Format remains "Mac OS Extended (Journaled), Return to instal prompt and continue with typical steps, Accept Time Machine Account migration, Restart, Perform Disk Utility again to repair permissions, Request system Software Update and accept any, and restart.

Also, "some programs can't launch"

- don't rush into opening all apps the very first time you revert to Snow Leopard.

- after you completely revert to the last saved image before Lion transition,

- you still need to do Software Update (just in case things need updating)

- you still need to perform a complete Disk Utility / Repair Permissions "

This was by iRadu. Also if you scroll up to a post by nuno1959, he says the same thing in a different way.

You don't install SL from your Time Machine drive. You install from the SL Install Disk. Once you have booted from SL

go DIRECTLY to Disk utility in the menu bar and choose to erase your hard drive. Back up your files before you do this.

I was holding my breath the whole time I did this, but by following the the posts by iRadu and nuno1959, it worked.

Cheers, Colleen