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

Tech Harmony wrote:

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!

Ugh. 4343. Wow. How did the process make that happen? And how do I get it back up?

Hey,

I just installed SL on a brand new MacBook Pro 15-inch shipped only last week.

Everything worked just fine, without any problems. I already used the machine and it seems to work perfectly.

The only thing I did diferent was, that I couldn't start up from the external, bootable SL system disk, the MBP stopped when the Apple symbol showed up and ferezed there.
So I booted from the Lion recovery partition and restored my SL dmg with the DiskUtility there.

So obviously it also can be done this way and it's working on the newest MacBook Pros…

Have a nice evening, and greetings from cold Germany!

Tilmann

@tilmannr... I like this method that utiliizes the Lion Recovery partition's Disk Utility to restore the system image... it also would mean people could do interesting things like dual boot or recover Lion/SnowLeo in the future. There are some steps in the regular Procedures that completely erase and partition the entire drive... maybe it's time to remove those steps so that we are only erasing the main Lion volume but not destroying the entire partition information. I think from a fixer's point of view, repartitioning is a sort of cleaning/good-housekeeping habit before putting on an OS but for our purposes, we probably should preserve the Lion Recovery partition. It's too bad we can't modify the original instructions but I will try to make a note to modify/enhance the web site instructions if anyone happens to use it.

@Great Big Radio.... don't worry about that benchmark as that sounds about right for the iMac... I mean, try rebooting and running the test with nothing else open if you'd like, but for some reason the iMacs don't use their full performance power when downgraded this route. I was just curious if the Genius Bar had a way they did it that magically ensured you got the highest speed. In fact, if they had cloned another iMac Snow Leopard to your computer and not a generic (I'm assuming here), then I would think it would have the specific iMac-enabling features. It's been a mystery this thread has not solved other than by using the factory restore discs for your particular model iMac. So there's no way to "fix" it beyond that and because that benchmark is still so fast, no need to think about it until a year or three from now when you upgrade to Lion.

So you had to use a small trick. I did something similar when I installed Tiger on the 1st generation Air, shipped with Leopard. It worked!

Hi Roy,

so, I don't know if the new MBP will run well under Snow Leopard 10.6.8. This is something that some brave soul will have to test.

Finally, I had the chance to try it by myself in a local Apple dealer and it works.

I cloned my mid 2009 MacBook Pro 17" HD running 10.6.8 with Carbon Copy Cloner app to an external 2.5" firewire HD.

I plugged this FW HD to a late 2011 MacBook Pro 17" and selected it as startup drive.

It works… 10.6.8 started up and run flawlessly in this new MacBook.

I tried some ppc apps (that need rosetta) with some complex archives and worked perfect.

This means that if I wanted, I could use back Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the external drive to the internal. Or just unscrew the back cover and swap the drives.

Thanks

I bought a MacPro 6-Core early this year.

If i now will buy another one - will it boot from the 10.6.4 DVD which was shipped with this machine early this year?

Roy,

I really appreciate all of your hard work and dilligence on this. As someone who supports thousands of Macs at a major UC school system it's been very helpful to know that for some users (who require Rosetta) still have a little longer for that lease on life.

I'm going to give SL Server a go as well over the weekend on a new machine as several of use it for testing/trial purposes and I feel like it too should work (if the client works).

Thanks!

I have SL Server running on MBP 8,3 17" i7 Early 2011. No problems. Managed to use CarbonCopyCLoner to copy all my other stuff over to the new SLS install. Some permissions need to be fixed, but otherwise all looks OK so far - running Appleworks 6, Eudora 6.2 so far.

Played with Snow Leopard CLient in VirtualBox4.1.6 and it runs fine, but has issue with file sharing access (no guest additions support on mac) and virtual machien chewing CPU (known issue). Was going to try virtual SL on Lion as a solution, but happier to run SL for now.

According to iFixit readers, the target disk method works in 2011 Mac Mini. http://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/58958/Snow+Leopard+on+Mac+Mini+2011

I used an external SL hard drive from MBP 1,1 to boot the MBP 8,3 and usd the Roy method on the fast new machine - took 40 mins to build.

Ian Cheong wrote:

I have SL Server running on MBP 8,3 17" i7 Early 2011. No problems.

I don't understand... the 17" MBP 8.3 (Early 2011) shipped with 10.6.6 when it was released in February of 2011. So what did you revert from? I was mainly curious to see if Snow Leopard Server would run on a machine that came with Lion preinstalled, not originally shipped with Snow Leopard. Did your machine ship with Lion?

@Harald Kohler ... Mac Pro should work. Just heed Roy's reminder/warning in the post above yours. Doesn't hurt to try it and if for some reason it doesn't work, you can come back to this thread for how to get your Mac Pro working. If you buy it from the Apple Store directly, you might be able to have the geniuses install Snow Leo for you!

@Ian Cheong ... I thought Targe Disk Method and The Procedure here (and derivations thereof) would work on the Mac Minis... I thought the main problem with the Minis (and iMacs) are that their Geekbench/Xbench scores are not the highest they can be. It would appear there is a driver/kext or something else missing from these "universal" builds we are doing that diminishes processor scores. However, because the results are still so fast, most people don't care. I believe it would take someone from the "alt mac" community to solve this problem but otherwise, I think these various methods will work for the Mini. At least that was my impression from feedback in this thread.

@JasonFear .... my early 2011 13" Macbook Pro shipped with Lion so it's entirely possible that Ian's Macbook Pro shipped with Lion. Since he refers to it as a "new SLS [Snow Leo Server] install," even if he were going from Snow Leo to Snow Leo Server, he probably had to use one of these methods to get it installed because it would not install from retail disc (unless he has the factory/restore discs for your model). He makes no mention of using the install discs to install his machine -- which, again, would not be possible unless they were the factory discs for your specific models. At any rate, there was no hardware change made to early 2011 machines that shipped with Lion vs. Snow Leo, the only difference between them is which OS they shipped with (with the SLeo machines shipping with restore discs, I assume, whereas the Lion machines did not).

With any newer hardware changes, heed Roy's reminder several posts above this one. Then YMMV.

(I got a refurb which shipped with Lion and no discs.) I have SL family pack discs and SLS discs which I got new.

Hi Roy,

I purchased a Macbook Pro 15" 2.0 2011 (October) which came with Lion 10.7. I tried to live with it but it was just like a circus performing tricks when I didn't need it. I stumbled across your post and followed your method to the T. I seemed to keep failing when trying to locate the system file in the image. Anyway I tried it a diiferent way, I installed my 10.6.3 onto VMFusion 4.1 updated to 10.6.8 (only build to allow Snow Leopard Client by accident:?) running inside lion. I then plugged in an external drive and connected it to VM, entered Disk Utility and restored snow leopard dirive to external. Once done, booted into Lion recovery and went to disk util like above and restored the new Lion drive to Snow Leopard. It all works great as I do audio production. The battery only lasts 3.5-4 hrs max on a brand new machibe very strange,

I will endeavour with your method of creating images though.

One last point, the exact words I was quoted by an apple tech at applecare. "Sorry sir I can confirm your machine will not run Snow Leopard 100%" You are wasting your time! - Why do you want to downgrade from am amazing OS likw Lion?? - This made me even more determined. I sit here smiling:))

Probably not, but you must test for yourself. If the generations are not close to each other, the probability is lower and lower. On the other hand, there are various methods to identify a trick. I could install Tiger on the first gen. MBA, which shipped with 10.5.1 already, by cloning a Tiger system unto that MBA. It worked just fine, but only because it was a generation close to the previous one, this could not be possible now, of course.

First of all thank you Roy for taking the time to start this post. I just bought an MacBook pro with lion solely because I was sure I could roll it back to snow leopard after reading your guide. I spent the better part of last night getting things ready but I am having problems.

I followed parts a and b with no big issues and everything seemed to goto plan. I ended up with the sl 10.6.3 with automated 10.8 upgrade bundle ( I did not remove the add user step) as a dmg which I copied to an empty USB drive (250 gb). I did this on a mbp I bought in 2009. My new mbp is identical except it has lion.

I started the lion mbp and created a new partition called machdsl and set this portion as the boot Partion and copied image from USB drive to this new partition. Restarted and just got apple logo and 3 beeps which repeat. No key strokes seemed to do anything. I then restarted and held option key and got into the restore option and tried to restore from new partition, mbp restart and same 3 beeps.

Before starting this endeavor I spoke with apple support and the very helpful rep told me that your method would not work on my machine but that I was welcome to try it. According to him late August hardware changed and it is now impossible to put sl on the Mbps. Rep told me I would not be able to get sl to boot and so far he seems right.

Ive read that if I wipe the hd on the new mbp and then restore with sl it might work since the lion restore partition is preventing the sl from loading- am I doing something wrong with your method or should I wipe the lion hd, or should I just take it back and buy a cheap windows7 laptop. This is for my son and I will not support lion. I have spent 5 minutes with lion and I already hate it. Old mbp loaded to the gills boots faster than clean lion OS.

I'm quite knowledgeable with IBM machines but I'm definitely a noob when it comes to macs. I bought macs for the family to avoid having to do battle every other night with the household computers. Hopefully you can help. Thanks to everyone posting you're all abig help to the Mac community.