HowTo revert new MacBook Pro, Mac Pro or iMac to Snow Leopard

After making five attempts at step "A" (the program crashed each time), I now have two words for anyone wanting to replace Lion with 10.6.8: Genius Bar.

They happily did a fresh install of 10.6.8 into my brand new iMac i5. No problems, no inqisition, no sweat. Took 'em seven minutes. By contrast, I spent a total of 14 hours trying to do it myself with disastrous results.

@Great Big Radio, sounds like your Genius Bar actually knew what they were doing and were willing to do it. Congrats! Although it'd be difficult to install 10.6.8 in 7 minutes because you need to install the base OS and then run the Combo Updater.... unless of course they had an image premade, courtesy of "The Procedure" 😉

Sounds like people elsewhere in the thread spent hours talking to Genius Bars who told them it couldn't be done or were warned that it would void their warranty, etc. So it sounds like your Genius Bar sees reason...maybe they all do now 😉 YMWV

If anyone can get their hands on their restore/install discs, then they'll be in good shape too.... that's probably the fastest route, aside from waiting for the discs to actually ship.

Now if your hard drive fails or you need to reinstall your OS for any reason, you may have another couple trips to/from the Apple Store... iMac in tow. The prospect of carting an iMac to/from the Apple Store isn't my idea of a good time although I'll admit that neither is 14 hours of #install-fail lol. Just kidding, I know it's complex and if you follow the steps at the beginning of the thread, there are a few twists that have since been updated. These wonderful discussion forums won't let anyone update posts with better info. Real genius.

Those late to the party can try this slightly cleaned up version https://sites.google.com/site/downgradeyourmac/the-procedure but it hasn't been updated to reflect ways you can do this without a Firewire cable.

Thanks for the heads'up on yet another way to get this done.... seems like close to half a dozen ways to #win, something for every skill level and interest. Add "gracious Genius Bar" to the list!

They have just about all versions of all OS's on their triage drives. (How awesome would it be to have one of those bad boys?) I'm not kidding - it actually took about six minutes to install it on my iMac. I was out of the store in record time.

I need 10.6.8 for Pro Tools 8. Lion does not play well with it. Hence the move to revertland, and they were very understanding of that.

The genius did inform me that if I did want to return to Lion, I would probably have to bring it back in, but it'll be free. If I wanted to save a trip, I could buy it from the App Store, but thirty bucks is thirty bucks. As you said, YMMV, and perhaps bringing it in during a busy time in the store may have contributed to his taking the path of least resistance.

Happy customer here. Hope it sets an example!

rsx-s wrote:

I need snow leopard to run Adobe CS5 on a daily basis( I freelance after school), and am learning film editing with Final Cut Pro 7.

Adobe CS5 runs beautifully on Lion. I can't address Final Cut.

Great Big Radio wrote:

They have just about all versions of all OS's on their triage drives. (How awesome would it be to have one of those bad boys?) I'm not kidding - it actually took about six minutes to install it on my iMac. I was out of the store in record time.

Ha I love it! This Procedure lets you get one OS image closer to the dream of a multi-OS restore-bank! Muahahahaha. How amazing to have an array of pristine OSes deployed over Thunderbolt.... *drool.*

If you get a chance, I'd be curious what your Geekbench scores are! No worries, just curious how the Genius Bar restore stacks up to known benchmarks for your model. Peace!

Tech Harmony wrote:

Now if your hard drive fails or you need to reinstall your OS for any reason, you may have another couple trips to/from the Apple Store... iMac in tow.

Did they blow away your Lion recovery partition? If not I owuld think you would be able to restore it yourself.

You can make a bootable Lion install disk from this partition as well.

Yeah, the down-versioning did blow out the Lion recovery partition. But they said it would be back in there if I re-grade back (forward?) to Lion.

Correct, as soon as you put Lion back, RP is back again too.

I thought you needed the Lion Recovery Partition in order to make the Lion recovery dongle and to "put Lion back" later since that's your only copy .... without repurchase or convincing Apple.

For those that use the stock Genius Bar route (e.g. no dual boot), maybe bring a USB stick with you to see if they can make your Lion recovery dongle first. If they're cool enough to give you Sleo, they'll surely take care of your dongle 😉

You can make a Lion recovery dongle using a friend's Lioness (http://support.apple.com/kb/dl1433) but in any of these failure scenarios, we are "stuck" recovering Lion, not Snow Leo.

I don't think we can use the Lion recovery mode to restore a Snow Leopard Time Machine. I don't think so because restores seem to refresh the System Files so you would need a Snow Leo disc...which would be unbootable unless you had a factory disc.

I'm thinking the better bet for people is using something like Carbon Copy Cloner (or SuperDuper) to clone your current hard drive to an external backup drive (NOTE: you can clone to a new disk image on the backup drive using CCC which makes the file easier to wrangle if you've got other stuff on your backup... I recommend a "read/write sparsebundle disk image".. However, you will not be able to boot directly off your clone from inside a disk image... there's lots of options so choose what fits).

You can do a one-time clone of your pristine Snow Leo install, lock it, and call that your MASTER....then you can either schedule additional daily clones or use Time Machine (or Chronosync) for your changing user files. It won't be a one-stop recovery but if you're on your own, without a Genius Bar in sight, you'll be glad you have the backups.

It's pretty simple to create a bootable lion install from the recovery partition yourself. See http://www.coolestguyplanet.net/make-a-boot-disk-from-os-x-lion-using-the-recove ry-partition/

@DewChugr Well, the point is you need your existing Lion Recovery partition in order to make a bootable Lion install dongle/drive.

Also, it looks like the Apple KnowledgeBase article came out after your linked article and that it may do the same thing in an easy automated fashion (much as I love Terminal). Unless these links do two different things, I would just use the Apple KnowledgeBase article... And, like I said, you need the Lion recovery partition in order to make an external one.

Finally, you're still stuck with Lion *rawr*

Lion is the first Mac OS that I really dislike. Bummer.

It is even simpler to create a boot flash or dmg using Lion DiskMaker (best is a flash). This is not recommended by Apple, but it seemingly works, it worked for me. I am not very enthusiastic by the uselessly sophisticated Lion-style, even if I agree that default installation should not be as an erase-an-install method. Yet there are instances, as proved in this forum, that such a pristine installation is the best solution, provided that a good backup has been done.

I do not dislike Lion, it is just an unfinished product, with many incoherent parts and inconsistent solutions. But I may live with this, as some other parts are good.

Lion is the first Mac OS that I really dislike. Bummer.

My first Mac OS Was 1.1 back in 1984. I always enjoy each upgrade.

The only time I skipped an upgrade was from OS 9 to 10.2. (I skipped 10.0 and 10.1)

Sad to report, I have now gone back to 10.6.8. (Snow Leopard)

In the Windows world, which I am sadly forced to use occasionally, I wisely skipped Vista, and went from Windows XP to Windows 7.

I was able to get over most of the technical problems with Lion. I felt that the interface was “dumbed down” and harder to use and missing some features (Bounce was removed from mail).

SL is indeed a solid Mac OS, but Tiger remains the best Mac OS X ever, perhaps the best Mac OS in the absolute: clean, well done, stable, easy to use, logical, beautiful... a masterpiece of design and software.