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

If you have an existing Snow L' mac and have just bought a mac running Lion, this worked for me...

Perhaps this is a little easier for "newbies" to understand. This will be repeating info gained from the last 22 pages (thanks all!) and it worked for me today!

Apple care informed me i needed a sep' Snow leopard disc to the one supplied with my 2010 IMac. I spent $39 and it didn't work, all i got was 3 annoying "beeps."

So...!

You need an existing Mac running the latest (10.6.8) Snow L.

1-Download and use Superduper! to copy your hard drive (the 10.6.8 one) onto a sep' hard drive or large enough USB..(Make sure the hard drive/usb is formatted to Mac os Extended (journaled) - i havn't a clue what it means but it will ask you, and it works!

2-Then, connect your new independent 10.6.8 hard drive to your "lion macbook pro etc.

3-Force start your Lion mac into disc utility by holding down the command+ R keys and starting the computer. You should see both the original (Lion) and your new hard drive (Snow L) in the left hand box.

4-"Erase" the existing lion memory following the prompted instructions, making sure your setting is "Mac OS extended(journaled)" and replace with your "new hard drive" using "restore".

5-Exit Disc Utility and the Mac will ask you to choose your new 'hard drive " as the start up disc and restart. If it works you can rename the new"hard drive" if you want. I then used my time machine from the Snow L' to restore the settings for internet and email etc.

It seems wrong to go backwards with Mac Os but i had so many programmes, Parrallels, Photoshop and car/bike tuning bits etc that worked and were set up for Snow L' on my iMac that all i wanted from my new Macbook Pro was a portable version of this.

Now I have exactly what I want and that I understand...🙂

Good Luck!

hey,

got bored of seeing 'Macbook Pro firmware update: 2.7' in Sw update (list of available Sw-updates), so I:

-connected an ext. drive/launched time machine --- just to create a current backup

-installed firmware 2.7, then clicked 'restart'

-workz! 😎

The macbook pro I have is:

MacBookPro8,2 (Late 2011) (15" -- 2.2ghz config.)

Original OS: OSX Lion 10.7

On the Apple support page for macbook pro firmware-update 2.7......it (now?) says:

System Requirements

• OS X Lion 10.7.3 or later
• Mac OS X 10.6.8

Hi all,

I have been slogging my way through all 22 pages of this thread and had a question I was hoping someone might be able to help me with. I support Macs in a corporate environment. All of our Macs are bound to a Windows 2008 Active Directory domain. To make matters worse, it is an AD domain that ends in “.local”. With Mac OS X 10.6, up through version 10.6.7, as long as the Mac is plugged into the LAN, everything works fine. However, if you disconnect from the LAN, such as when you take a Mac laptop home, login on the Mac takes forever. At least that was the case until Mac OS X 10.6.8 came out.

With the 10.6.8 update, Apple changed their AD plugin and made the problem exponentially worse. With all Mac OS’s after 10.6.7, the long login time now occurs even when you are connected to the LAN. It also now takes an extremely long time to access any network resource that requires network authentication. As you can imagine, we have not updated any of our Macs beyond 10.6.7.

So now we have several new MacBook Pros that shipped with Lion that we are trying to get to run with 10.6.7. For the most part we have been successful. I have been able to put 10.6.7 onto the new Macs using Carbon Copy Cloner and an image that was made on a 2.2 GHz i7 MacBook Pro that shipped with Snow Leopard. Almost everything seems to work OK on these new MacBook Pros except for the trackpad. I can use the trackpad to move and click the cursor, but none of the multi-touch features work. When I click on the trackpad system preference pane, it isn’t able to detect the trackpad on the new MacBook Pro.

Obviously, there was a hardware change for the trackpad in the MacBook Pro since the one that shipped with Snow Leopard. As a further test, I upgraded this new MacBook Pro to 10.6.8, and sure enough, it can now detect the trackpad and configure it properly.

So after all of the above, my question is this: is it possible to copy the trackpad drivers from the 10.6.8 installation onto a 10.6.7 installation and get them to work? If so, does anybody know which files I will need to copy? Any input on this would be appreciated.

I would think if you looked for the Trackpad Plist file and then browsed that file it might give you a reference to the driver file name.

Right for the newest trackpad you need the 10.6.8 update.

Good Luck and best wishes.

Hello, I am following your procedure on a new macbook pro 13, i5 , 2.4ghz. Step A was fine, but this one (B 7 ) it seems not to work.

What I tried: Making a restore from the image created 10.6.8 on an external Usb stick. didnt work when I attached it and tried to boot from it from the macbook pro, It was not recognized.

7) copy this .dmg file to external, bootable, Snow Leopard 10.6.8 system disk (install in /Users/Shared/)

Do you mean, just copy, normal copying to for example a USB stick? thank you

@tmcbride67

I found some candidates for enabling the trackpad under 10.6.7 using 10.6.8 drivers. Anyone else reading this should not experiment with this unless you are comfortable with terminal or willing to render your system unbootable. As such, you should only really try this on a test install because recovering from a kernel panic, while doable, is beyond the scope of this discussion 😉

So @tmcbride67when I look in my /System/Library/Extensions of my 10.6.8 install and sort by date, I see some kexts that were modified June 7th 2011 at the top level. The one that seems most promising is "AppleMultitouchDriver.kext."

As I look through the other kexts I saw some other potentially relevant ones. Some that were dated from 2009 had sub-kexts inside them that were dated from June 7th 2011 as well. I see:

[watch my spelling! These are not exact!]

AppleUSBMultitouch

AppleUSBTopcase

AppleBluetoothMultitouch.kext

AppleHIDKeyboard

AppleHIDMouse

The reason I include USB ones is because when I use System Profiler to look at the USB bus, the trackpad (and bluetooth) seems to come off the USB bus.

Still, at first, I would consider trying only the AppleMultitouchDriver.kext from your 10.6.8 install with the following steps....

Now how do you do this?

You may be able to manually drag-copy a backup of any previous version of this kext from your 10.6.7 /System/Library/Extensions to back it up somewhere...and then drag the new 10.6.8 one into that folder.... but I prefer an app called "KextHelper" (Google it) because it will make a backup of any original kexts it may ovewrite and puts them in your hard drive root....then it installs the one you want. Never send a human to do what the computer will do better 😉

Now, copying stuff, even with KextHelper, isn't enough.

You've got to fire up Terminal and fix some permissions on the files you've dragged over. Again, on your first pass, I would limit it to installing the first kext only, fix permissions, then reboot and see if it works before adding on the others.

So in Terminal, normally I have set the permissions for the whole Extensions folder including contained kexts but I don't want to screw up your rig... so while tedious, I'll just show you how to fix permissions on an individual kext and you would repeat for each one you've moved:

sudo chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/AppleMultitouchDriver.kext

sudo chmod -R 755 /System/Library/Extensions/AppleMultitouchDriver.kext

rinse and repeat

When you are done fixing permissions on your files, run these commands:

sudo rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions.mkext

sudo rm -rf /System/Library/Caches/com.apple.kext.caches/Startup/Extensions.mkext

sudo diskutil repairpermissions /

[caution: sudo rm -rf is super powerful ... removes stuff... so just make sure you're pointing it at the exact right place!]

Now reboot and report back!

If your computer kernel panics, etc, try booting with the shift key held down to get into "safe mode" ... It will take awhile to boot in safe mode so don't panic (5-10 minutes?)

Alternatively, if you boot from a functioning install and connect/mount your hobbled drive...you can put the old drivers back in. You might not be able to use KextHelper because it may only act on your boot drive and not your target...but you can just move-copy the files you need around. But for the above terminal commands, you have to choose your target drive volume and not your boot drive! ... e.g. /Volumes/hobbleddrive/System/Library etc.

Then you can start over and try another variation/combination of kexts.

@Roy Miller,

Thanks for the input. Our biggest problem stems from our use of an AD domain that ends in ".local". Since the Mac uses ".local" for its multicast DNS, that seems to cause additional problems that don't exist if your AD domain ends in anything other than ".local". Before Lion was released, I spent a few months going back and forth with a couple Apple engineers on this issue. Initially, they were telling me that it was a know issue with 10.6 and that the issue would be solved when Lion came out. Then Lion was released and the problems were actually made worse. Finally, Apple flat out said that I would either need to change the name of our domain to fix the problem, or implement IPv6 as a workaround. As you can imagine, those ideas didn't go over to well with our network admin.

Just as an FYI, we did set up a new test domain that ended in ".internal". When we bound a few test Macs to that network and logged in with new test accounts in that domain, we didn't experiance any of the problems we had with the ".local" domain. We then set up a trust between the ".local" and ".internal" domains. The idea was that we would bind the Macs to the ".internal" domain, but have the users log in with their accounts in the ".local" domain. Unfortunately, it appears that the Macs would only allow logins from accounts in the domain they are bound to. They don't allow logins from any other domains, even if there is a trust between the two domains.

So that has brought me back to square one. My next step is going to be trying out the AD solution offered by Centrify. It isn't cheap, but it may be our only option.

@Tech Harmony,

Thanks for your post. So far, I have only had time to try swapping out the AppleMultitouchDriver.kext using your procedure. The good news is that it didn't blow up the test Mac. The bad news is that it didn't fix the problem. I will eventually try swapping out the other files you listed and let you know how it goes.

Have you htought about moving to Windows PC when you need to replace the Mac computer you are now using?Sounds a lot simpler then what you are going through.

Or going to a Mac server system?

@Tech Harmony,

Well, it is not looking good for getting the 10.6.8 trackpad drivers to work under 10.6.7. I copied over both the "AppleMultitouchDriver.kext" and the "AppleUSBMultitouch.kext" files. That fixed one part of the problem, but created another. After copying those files using your procedure, the trackpad is now showing up in the System Prefferences. I was even able to get the multitouch features to work properly. There is now one new problem, however. I now can't "click" on anything using the trackpad! I can move the cursor around, but if I try clicking on anything, nothing happens. If I plug a mouse in, I am able to click with that. I'm going to try copying a few more files over to see if it fixes anything, but I am not hopeful at this point.

@tmcbride67 That's pretty amazing! The fact that it worked at all is pretty huge and actually makes me think it's doable.... but at some point it stops being practical to try 😉

When you say you can get multitouch to work, you're saying that the trackpad recognizes your touches, swipes and gestures? So it recognizes tap/touch inputs? Only with multiple fingers? Does it recognize single tap/touch clicks? It sounds like the actual mechanical click doesn't work but if multitouch works, do tap/touch-clicks work when enabled?