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

You really should try Lion.

I did try it and went back to Snow Leopard. About half the users I know either switched back to Snow Leopard (or wish they could).

The younger generation love it in particular. Snow Leopard is just so......yesterday.

I agree completely. Those 8 to 16 years old love it. It reminds them of their iPhone.

Tom in London wrote:

That makes me feel sad, so I'm going to click on the "stop email notifications" for this thread.

Oh Tom. That's sad. And now you won't know when people are making spelling mistakes and using wrong pronunciation. That's what everybody counts on you for. Nothing else.

Goodnight

So to recap 😉

There are a numbrer of ways to down/re/upgrade your Lion to Snow Leopard.... but if you ever want to revert to Lion, remember to make a recovery stick!

I'm sure I'm forgetting some routes but, broadly speaking:

1. You can use "The Procedure" in this thread to make a pure virgin 10.6.8 system image that can then be restored or cloned to your Lion machine.
2. You can use a Target Disc Mode procedure to boot your new computer's hard drive to an older computer and then get yourself up to 10.6.8 through a retail install and updates.
3. You can get the install/restore/factory discs for your model computer by geting them from Apple. You'd probably want to call them for them and they might cost you 15$...might be free.
4. You can go to the Apple "Genius" Bar and have them revert your computer to Snow Leopard for you.
5. You can clone an existing 10.6.8 install to your new computer.

NOTE ON SPEEDS: The Macbook Pros seem to benchmark just dandy with any of these methods. The iMacs require the install/restore/factory discs to run at full speed. I think the Mac Pros should run optimally, not sure. The Minis will run slower than benchmark.... I can't remember if someone figured this out yet in the other thread but as the new Minis don't have restore/install/factory discs (I don't think), I think they need an "open mac" technique to supply their missing drivers (kexts). I think they were doing something with the kernel too over in the Mini discussion forum (don't have the link handy, sorry). Honestly, I shouldn't even mention this part because if you didn't know it was slower than bench, you wouldn't know it! Everything is still fast and dandy.

Closing Thought: Honestly, I held off on upgrading to Snow Leopard from LEOPARD until Lion came out. I had hoped that Snow Leopard would solve, among other things, my Flash/Safari shenanigans (dozen windows open, each with a dozen tabs... yeah yeah I know) but it turns out Flash/Safari seem to perform worse under SLeo than Leopard. No wonder SJ (RIP) was so ****** about Flash I guess. But that's a discussion for another time.

remember to make a recovery stick!

I would recommend making a Lion install DVD.

I made a copy of my Lion system with CC Cloner. It is still bootable on another, non-SSD partition. For the unlikely case that I'll ever need it again...

many many thanks to Roy Miller for his fantstic recipe. I was going mad with Lion, half of our software didn't work anymore and I felt like I was the only one in the company working with windoze on my new MBP.

Thanks again Roy, I feel like a human being working on the Mac again, not the other way round.

Thanks to all the people, Roy Miller on top, for the explanations (I've read all of them right from the start! Pheeeww!).

I am awaiting my new iMac 27" mid 2011 i7 and I know that it will be shipped in a couple of days obviously with that horrible Lion sleeping inside it.

I have finally found this thread, passing sleepless nights in search for answers, and finally understood that I MAY be able to boot from an external HD with a newly and fresh installed 10.6.8 (actually it was a 10.6.3 then upgraded to 10.6.8). I will for sure use my iMac 24" early 2008 (the one I am on now, although it's running 10.5.8! I am not the "Upgrade" type! 😝) to perform a clone onto the 27" from the external HD using CCC, and then I will, sadly, have to reinstall everything on the new iMac, since it seems that I will NOT be able to restore anything from my 10.5.8 Time Machine Backup using the Lion Recovery HD "Restore from Time Mahine" option.

I was thinking if it was a good idea in finally upgrading to Snow Leopard my iMac 24", but still not sure... Cloning a 2Tb HD from the old 24" to the new 27" would in this case be easier, in fact... Have to sleep over this decision and tomorrow I will likely make my mind up.

I was wondering, after all, what are the physical differences between a 27" iMac shipped say in july 2011 (that is labelled "mid 2011" after all) and an almost identical iMac 27" that shipped on february 2012 with Lion pre-installed? The EFI Firmware Boot ROM? Because it seems that there are NO physical diferences between the two models, exccept from the OS X (Lion vs SnowL) itself... as far as I can understand.

And after reading all of this posts, after all, it would seem to be a simple (?) matter of finding a suitable way of putting one's hands onto a, iMac 27" original 10.6.8 SnowL DVD (grey ones) that almost a year ago Apple used to sell along with their iMacs...

Have some friends at Apple Care: gonna call them tomorrow, and see if they could be of any help in providing me with such a DVD: this would luckily be the easiest way.

Thank you for every answer anyone would provide with.

Cheers,

You can go to the Apple "Genius" Bar and have them revert your computer to Snow Leopard for you.

On a recent trip to the Apple Store I encountered two customers that were having their computers switched from Lion to Snow Leopard.

Definitely do not have to reinstall everything - I didn't. One can use Carbon Copy Cloner to shift apps and everything in the users home folders, since it will not overwrite folders/files that are newer on the destination in the right mode (probably synchronize - it was a long time ago I did that).

Some apps that don't work might need more stuff copied manually from /Library/Application Support or <user>/Library/Preferences, etc.

Note: some apps dependent on Rosetta died with a MacOS 10.6.8 security update this year, but a later update fixed it. (Much anguish in the meantime.)

Ziatron wrote:

You can go to the Apple "Genius" Bar and have them revert your computer to Snow Leopard for you.

On a recent trip to the Apple Store I encountered two customers that were having their computers switched from Lion to Snow Leopard.

That's good news because when I went in a week ago they said that I had to buy Snow Leopard separately and install it myself. I think they wanted me to give up, however and try again as it is the only thing preventing me from upgrading my laptop.

It is , imho , safer to assume you DO have to reinstall everything. Unfortunatley some apps create a lot of clutter these days, notably if they orignate from the adobe empire.

Little helpers like Default folder also require reinstalling, so do many Photoshop plugins.

BTW CCCloner may say that your HD is not partioned properly for rebooting etc.... Well it works fine, just make a complete backup.

So best be prepared and make a printour of all tour serial numbers and similar stuff, Aplle IDs and you name it.

Better prepare to much than not enough.

I have done the procedure on two other computers since, including our new server on an Imac and it worked 🙂

Again, a month and two machines later I am so glad I did it, I have even recommended Roy miller's recipe with thanks to others, got one eually plesed feedback.

Apple, why don't you give us the option whilst ordering the machine?

As to 'genius bars' I think there are very few of us who will ever get cloe to one, let alone be sure that will work

hey, noticed that EFI firmware updates are available. hmm....install? 😕

@MacCekkoReinstalling apps can be therapeutic -- both for you and your machine 😉 It will likely run faster/better and clean up cruft between 10.5.8 and 10.6.8. However, I think what you could just do is get your 10.6.8 system going on the new machine, boot up, and then use "Migration Assistant" from the new computer's Utilities folder to migrate your old 10.5.8 Mac to this new one. That process will handle the conversions/cruft better than a Carbon Copy Clone from 10.5.8 apps to 10.6.8 apps. You'll just have to figure out how to make your 10.5.8 drive available (over network? Firewire Target Disc Mode, etc).

@rpg2288 General rule of thumb I operate by is: if things are working well, don't update them. At least resist for as long as possible and do so only if you are willing to fix any fallout 😉 That being said, I've heard of shenanigans with Thunderbol, external monitors, sleep/wake and I believe some of the firmware updates have helped things. BUT it took them 2 or 3 successive firmware updates to get it right (or, er, better) and that's just sloppy in my opinion. Really don't want to be mucking with firmware much at all. So if you're experiencing buggery, you could go for it. The 2 or 3 firmware updates that I eventually succumbed to did not mess up my Snow Leopard install. I see I have a new one available now but I'm afraid to do it 😉 Let me know if you do!

I know many people like to reinstall everything from scratch. Perhaps that is a legacy of experience with other OS's (eg Win). When you have a load of applications on board like I do, reinstalling everything and fixing up all the preferences would take days/weeks of lost productivity. I have been migrating my stuff from OS to OS over many years without reinstalling by default. I have had no major issues since System 7 on a Mac Classic II. An occasional application that protests might require a reinstall or fix to authentication system, but that is the exception rather than the rule. Some applications wil break with an OS upgrade and it is no hassle to remove them.

I lose a lot less productive time by not wanting a "clean" machine and have no regrets. The system log may provide clues to applications with problems, but there are still a load of errors in there that are OS "features" (with no fixes).

PS Many thanks to Roy for starting this thread.

Friends,

my experience has been a good one, and without your astonishing and kind help, I could not have done it.

Hhere's what happened and how I succeeded; I shall try to be brief, but since my english is horrible I can't often avoid to appear a bit "formal" in my written posts. I apologise for this.

Here we go:

- My brand new iMac 27" Quad i7 Sandybridge 3.4 GHz, has shipped this morning.

- I tried a booting with the 10.6.3 Retail DVD but three beeps occured. I expected them...😟

- The day before I created a "special" HD containing 10.6.3 then updated to 10.6.8 v1.1 via Apple Software Update, so I could in fact boot the new 27" with this external HD.

- Because of my "human error" (I am lieing: I wanted to try an installation starting from scratch on a blank HD) I wiped out the entire original internal "Macintosh HD" Lion partition, the one tha had on it the Lion "Recovery HD", but I've managed to stick it on an USB stick (!!) BEFORE wipeing it out, with the help of Lion Recovery Disk Assistant and your advice.

- I booted in SnowL

- Launched Disk Utility and created two partitions: a 64 Gb one for Lion and a 2 Tb (well, 2 Tb minus 64 Gigs to be precise...) for the other one, onto I had planned to install SnowL. Err... not "install" but "Clone"!

- The Lion Installation began, DLing files from the net. After a bit (here in Italy bandwidths are mostly ridiculous compared to yours in America, as far as I can tell), since it tooked too long (and I began somehow to worry: keep in mind that this has been my absolutely FIRST "relationship" with Lion and all of its somehow new procedures), I then canceled it and inserted the Lion DVD that I had DLed from AppStore and burned to a physical Single Layer DVD.

- I booted from this one and started up the Lion Installation process.

- It took a while anyway, but it ended up with the normal partition and the Recovery HD partition witch is invisible in Finder® etc.

- Restarted the iMac.

- This time I booted from the External USB HD containing SnowL 10.6.8.

- I then began cloning my external HD with 10.6.8 SnowL onto the blank 2 Tb partition using CCC.

Actually I am running the process, but my expectations are quite obvious: ending with a Dual Boot System, composed as follows: Mac HD with SnowL, Mac HD with Lion, Recovery HD plus a Bootcamp Partition with Win (which has to be created from scratch, I am afradi. Bootcamp 3.0 drivers for my iMac 24" will NOT most certainly work for the 27" iMac).

- In the end, I will use, as noted by Tech Harmony, Migration Assistant with which I plan to restore the entire OS X 10.5.8 from my Time Machine Backup, that has been taken form my "old" iMac 24" (the one I am currently on).

If everything goes well, apart from the enormous time that it will need to finish (1 Tb is a BIG mass of data to be restored via an USB external Time Machine disk, after all), I will have succeeded in my fantastic plan.

Again, thanks to each and everyone of you for having shared such "secret" although pivotal information.😎

Cheers!😉