Anyone know how to uninstall Lion and reinstall snow leopard without having to pay the $29?

Downgrade Lion to Snow Leopard

1. Boot from your Snow Leopard Installer Disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.

2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.

3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID then click on the OK button. Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.

4. Quit DU and return to the installer. Install Snow Leopard.

This will erase the whole drive so be sure to backup your files if you don't have a backup already. If you have performed a TM backup using Lion be aware that you cannot restore from that backup in Snow Leopard. I suggest you make a separate backup using Carbon Copy Cloner 3.4.1.

I would do the reinstallation because it is quicker and less likely to get corrupted. However, you can restore your Home folder, applications and support files, and system preferences from your TM backup just before you complete the Setup Assistant after Snow Leopard completes the installation.

jjhall,

Were you able to use migration assistant to bring you back to your last backup pre-lion?

I know the post-lion time machines will not work in snow leopard, but I'm still unclear from the comments whether any pre-lion timemachine backups will import when I reinstall snow leopard.

Thanks in advance for any reply!

jjhall,

Thanks!

A quick follow up:

I reinstalled snow leopard per the above instructions. When migration assistant came up, I transferred from my time machine.

However, I think I might have missed something. My iMac is incredibly slow. I mean near inoperable. Several applications will not open and give an error message alerting me that the version of that app is not compatible with the OS that I am running (snow leopard).

I think what has happened is that the time machine restore was from lion. I was under the impression that snow leopard would not even recognize any time machines from lion and would automatically select the last snow leopard backup performed prior to the installation of lion.

My plan now is to go into my time machine and manually delete any lion backups and go throught the snow leopard reinstallation again.

Thoughts on this?

Tips?

Thanks again!

Hi Roscoe, why not just leave your Time Machine repository alone, and restore from a Snow Leopard snapshot that was made shortly before you installed Lion?

manually mucking around in Time Machine is likely to cause other problems. The OS does not allow users to modify the Time Machine repository for a reason, or many reasons, which I believe is a very good indicator that we should not manually adjust files within the repository.

worth considering, IMHO. ;-)

cheers!

Thanks for the reply!

I did not see an option to select a particular snapshot during the migration assitant portion of the install. Did I miss something? How do I go about selecting what time in the time machine I wish to install from?

Thanks again!

To clarify, my time machine made a few lion backups after the install. There are still backups that predate lion, but just not sure how to point either setup assistant or migration assistant to the snow leopard backups.

Thanks!

I believe that when you boot from your SL install disc, prior to doing an installation, there should be a menu bar with several menus. One is titled (something like) "Utilities". In this menu are several items, such as "Terminal", "Disk Utility", etc. There should be one that is something like: "Restore System from Backup".

Select this, then select the Time Machine repository as the backup source. Then you should be able to select which Time Machine instance from which to restore. Choose your computer hard drive as the destination, make sure everything is plugged into "stable" power sources, and execute.

I'm writing this mostly from memory, and haven't performed such restores often, so I may have some of the names of the menu items incorrect. But I think you can get enough of the flavor to get beyond my terminology errors....

cheers!

Roy,

Thanks for the input!

When I get home from work, I'll test this out and let you know what happens.

A couple of other options I might test if the above doesn't do the trick:

1. Do a straight up SL install with no time machine transfer during the setup assitant. After install, mount the time machine disk, enter time machine (if it lets me) and then navigate to the pre-lion date and begin to manually select and reinstall what I need.

or

2. I have a clone of my machine that I could use to manually drag and drop everything I need, i.e. music, movies, documents, etc.

and, if that doesn't work,

3. cry and/or waive fists in the air, while cursing the day I downloaded lion...

Roy,

Completed the reinstall from time machine last night. Worked perfect! Just as you described.

A few notes for others dealing with this issue:

1. If you follow Roy's instructions above, you will see a selection menu that allows you to choose a particular date/time from your time machine backups. As a super handy guide, it even denotes which Mac OS was in use during that particular backup. For those of you moving from Lion back to Snow Leopard (I hesitate to call it "going back"), this is helpful and allows you to select the very last backup made under Snow Leopard.

2. While Time Machine does most of the work there are a couple of things to keep in mind that may help with your future backup management plans:

a. With two experiences with Time Machine and Aperture, I can say that while Time Machine does back up your Aperture Library, it is not perfect. All of your photos are there, but key photos may be messed up, etc. So after Time Machine did its deal, I restored from an Aperture Vault. This put everything back to where it was supposed to be. As a bonus, you cannot use any time machine backups from Lion to restore Snow Leopard, this means that you lose any photos/adjustments/etc. that have been made between in aperture after the installation of Lion. HOWEVER....you can create a vault in Lion that will restore in Snow Leopard. If you have any referenced files (I have some that are referenced to the iPhoto Library I used prior to upgradig to Aperture), you may have to use the locate referenced files feature. Not a big deal and it took me under 15 minutes.

b. For iTunes/iMovie etc. I found that it was helpful to have, in addtion to TM and Aperture Vault, a carbon copy of my iMac. See the Carbon Copy Cloner Link above. It is free. Works great. Send them a donation for good karma if it ends up being as helpful to use as it was to me. I simply opened the carbon copy, went to iMovie events, and iTunes music folder, searched by date, and dragged and dropped the files that were added after my last Snow Leopard time machine backup.

Hope this is somewhat helpful to folks who find themselves in the same situation as myself. A big thanks to everyone who responded to my questions and for the intial posts on this issue.

Until Apple gets its act together and releases an OS worthy of the Apple name, I'll be sticking with SL and am glad that it was relatively painless to go back, er, forward, whatever...

Thanks Roscoe . . . . 😎

I came back to this forum to share my experience. I'm working with a 2007/08 - 17" MB Pro. With the LEOPARD OS, not Snow Leopard. I used my original discs and reformatted, reinstalled Leopard. I was able to open Time Machine and restore the files saved on on an external drive. I used this time to make changes to my Apps, and having just doubled my RAM prior to the 'Lion Upgrade', had no issues of slowing or freezing as others are apparently having. Like you, this was relatively painless, though it did take some time to transfer all of my files.

I hesitated performing this process for nearly a month, but kept checking my back-ups to ensure that I had still some saved from the Leopard days. Unfortunately, I was unable to do much of anything. I'm a graphic designer and sell items online, EVERYTHING came to a complete stop with Lion. I couldn't communicate with my printer at all, no fax, no copies, no prints, no scans. I couldn't download images from my camera. Some of my Apps, stopped working, I hated the missing 'Save As' feature. My image viewer and browsers crashed constantly, and my home network 'LOST' me! I couldn't take another day of NO productivity!😢

My advice to anyone changing or upgrading ANY O.S., whether Mac or PC, always; ALWAYS back up your drive first! We should be backing up often anyway, but it is certainly important to ensure the security of all of your files and program downloads or installations by copying everything prior to making any hardware or software changes. For a small investment of $50 to $100, you can get an external drive. Having the capability of restoring all of your data is . . . priceless!

Thanks everyone for sharing. Good luck to those experiences these problems. Have Faith, Apple will fix it's issues, and the other manufacturers WILL catch up on the driver codes. We all just need to be patient, until then; keep on 'backing up'! 😁 😉

*** JJ; were you able to restore an earlier back up? Did that fix your issue? I found a great deal on RAM from Crucial, sometimes this will help increase our speed and performance . . . . just a thought.

Christi