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

i did run the 10.6.8 v1.1 updater (1.1GB) again on the imac but i did not go into safe mode nor repaired permissions but i can give it a go. I suspect even with the SSD your geekbench numbers could be lower then it should be. I suspect what you said about the restore discs is true. Thanks so much for your help. i'm still open to any other comments though. By the way when trying to boot off the Mac Box set SL cd it beeped at me very loudly,is this normal or is this Apple's way of locking out people from trying to downgrade? I saw tons of videos and articles on the net over 3 weeks on how to downgrade and it seems to me that Apple has blocked each method.

I get their need to do this but some people have a legitimate need to revert for a while and then go forward when the situation is rectified, like the one fellow who posted his dilemma about being on Tiger and essentially being locked out of new systems because of no support for migration on Tiger to Lion or several others who can't run essential software that they need. I know the argument is that they should have known better but honestly that argument is weak, perhaps they should have had a warning screen that popped up saying that proceding with this install may render some software and hardware unsuable please contact your software and/or hardware provider before proceeding or just had a scanner that would provide you a list of incompatible hardware/software. Sure the user bares some responsblity but since Macs are targeted to computer noobs, i feel they have some responsbility and should have a simple way of making any downgrade to SL happen easily if the hardware prior to lion was supported i.e no 2011 mac mini or macbook air. That would be fair.

Thanks so, so much for helping me. What are the system specs for your downgraded machine is it a core 2 duo or i processor sandy bridge? I thank Roy and all of you who have contributed and i really would like to be able to do it. Seems it might be the only way to get the system performance you paid for.

My imac is partitioned 1 TB with SL and 1TB blank. I found out about geekbench after i had deleted the lion partition which is now my blank partition. Can i use this blank partition to use roy's method thus negating the need to get my macbook involved?

My macbook is from 2008 and i bought it because it can output composite video. I travel a lot, for long periods and use the in room tv and macbook as my entertainment system (and also to watch on the plane ride), so front row really helps as it lets me cue up music, eye tv recordings, tivo trancoded transfers, itunes movies and shows all with a simple remote. Problem with hotel rooms is that even if there is a flat screen i have never seen HDMI or DVI connections on them regardless of how high end the hotel is. All you get is composite for sure then if you are lucky component and/or VGA. With an ios device i can also use it as a remote to control my slingbox but this system is heavy and sharing with the wife on the plane ride to annual or bi-annual vacations is not so nice as the screen quality is nasty. I was hoping that last year's 2011 macbook air 11" can let me do the same with a scan convertor. I bought all the parts i need but have not tested yet. So since this is macbook is my entertainment life blood, i'm really weary of doing anything that will cause issues for me.

Hi zirkenz... what step are you stuck on? I imagine my explanation of Roy's instructions might have confused things but there must be a specific step you're stuck on. I went through each of his steps, I reread your posts, and then I tried to tailor everything that you would see to your computer. It would help me a lot if you would let me know how far you can get. I don't have much time to devote to a video although that's a nice idea 😉

While you are waiting for his stuff to finish, you can read my thoughts/answers below 😉

1. Booting from an i5 iMac 2011 disc: Maybe that chart I posted with all the restore disc releases would say which discs come with which machine... but usually the restore discs didn't differentiate between processors, just years and models. There would be one for all the Macbook Pros of a given release... or all the iMacs of a given release. So if your i7 iMac is from the same release period as the i5 discs you've got, you should think they would work. Of course, the whole reason this is a unique situation is because of the TYPE of i5/i7 these are... sandybridge right? But I would think they should work. I received the factory disc for my MBP from Apple but it's not your typical grey restore disc.... it's like a white factory disc... so it doesn't give me any extra clue as to what originally shipped with my i5 MBP 2011.

2. I don't know if I used a 10.6.3 base but the way this works, the clone you're making doesn't have any clue or preference or designation for the kind of computer you are making it on... it is a pure virgin master combining all of your base 10.6.x disc with all the the new 10.6.8 updates. So it doesn't run on anything until the first time you run it on your target machine. So that would be the first time this 10.6.8 master would even know what kind of computer it was running on: first boot. Then it could decide which drivers it needed to keep for your i7 or whatever.

Thing is,that's not how OSX has EVER worked. For a decade you could install OSX on an external hard drive and then boot that hard drive on any computer that could handle that version...all the drivers were always there... random awesome feature of Macs. So I'm not sure they would cripple this feature now....so sure, your method should have worked. But it didn't. And you don't see where you could have made a mistake 😉

In my opinion, it's better when your problem is the result of user error than something out of your control. You really should WANT to have made a mistake in your install process. If you didn't make a mistake, then either your computer is busted or you can't put Snow Leo on period. So what would I rather? I'd rather it turn out that I made a mistake and try again, or try another method. I know you can't see how Roy's method would yield different results from what you did, using your logic. But using your logic, you can't figure out how to actually DO roy's method 😉 So sure, while your theories are sound, so should your iMac be working perfectly. Any way you cut it, something went wrong ....and I'd always rather it be MY error than require a trip to the Apple Store. That's my pragmatism, YMMV 😉

3. If I understand you correctly, this should work... but so should what you originally did. Sure, do it... try it... why not? Thing is, I don't know if anyone in this thread tried a pure Target Disk method... it's a step in the method, but I don't know if anyone in this thread did a full target disc route like you originally did.... so for all I know there's something different about it this time. It seems like it should work but I would think there must be a thread about it then.

4. Apple always locked the restore discs to the product family... they just say "Macbook Pro" or whatever... you couldn't boot them on any computer but an MBP.... I have no idea if using a disk image of a restore disc in the Roy method would work... I wouldn't bother with it if I was already having problems or unless I had a lot of time to run experiments. It might work perfectly and turn out that booting-for-install is the only thing the restore discs controlled. It's never been practical for me to figure out a workaround for the restore disc limitation so, unless you have no other choice or a lot of time, it's not something I would complicate matters with. If it booted on your iMac, then you wouldn't bother with any of these methods, you'd just boot it!

okay i have some interesting information:

I contacted geekbench asking if there was a bug in 2.2 and gave them my info, details and results, etc. They gave me a link to 2.13. Okay so i ran it and 2.13 gave 54xx and 2.2 gave me 53xx. They said maybe there is some hardware or software issue and asked if had tried it on lion.

I decide to install Lion on my imac using the recovery thumb drive i created. I paritioned 500 gb for this purpose and installed lion. I ran Geekbench 2.2 and 2.13 again under lion. This time 2.13 gave me 10230 and 2.2 gave me 95xx. So this proves that 2.2 is slower than 2.13. So clearly something was not right in the SL install either TDM or Roy's method or Apple is neutering the system.

Next i created a bootable clone of my imac running lion 10.7.1, booted of that ran geekbench 2.13 and 2.2 and got high scores same as above : 102xx and 95xx respectively. Then I erased and restored my sl partition with my roy method .dmg file. Ran thought setup again. It worked fine and i reran geekbench 2.13 and 2.2. I got the same low scores as above!!!. So this proves that system you use to restore the file using roy's method does not matter because i was on a lion clone and restored from that and it did the same thing.

Now i am rebuilding on the imac running lion 10.7.1 the restore file using Server Administration Tools 10.7.

I redownloaded 10.6.8 v1.1 updater on the imac running 10.7.1 and will recreate the .dmg file from the mac box set 10.6.3 disc. This will all be done on the imac running 10.7.1, then i will copy the resulting restore file to my 10.7.1 clone and restore my imac sl parition again and will report if there is any difference. This should prove if the system you build it on matters or not and whether the resulting file supports core i7 after aug 25 or perhaps it could prove that Apple has indeed done something in firmware to neuter the system This and my previous efforts should prove once and for all that neither the TDM method nor Roy method works in SL downrade that gives you 100% performance. Will report back later this evening......

Hey, I figured out (at least what I thought was) a cool way to restore the Lion Recovery HD.

After installing a new (physical) hdd and copying a disk image of SL (10.6.8)...I realized the recovery HD was gone. If a recovery HD partition is available, it's noticeably unmounted/hidden/locked within OSX. I created a recovery usb drive using the "Recovery Disk Assistant", which works well (and is cool)...but I thought, "what if this flash drive falls out of my laptop bag/forget it at home/won't mount//etc."

In the lion recovery HD disk utility (loaded via USB), I split "Snow Leopard" into 2 partitions (Snow leopard/Recovery HD) (allocating ~2 gb to the "Recovery HD" partition). Rebooting into OSX with the "Lion Recovery HD" drive plugged in...it was noticably invisible (in finder/application windows/etc.). Disk utiity showed something like "Cruzer 4gb usb device" - the partition wouldn't mount. Also, I tried running the recovery disk assistant in SL and an error said "you cannot create a recovery disk because the recovery disk assistant is not compatible with this version of OSX (OSX 10.7 required). So...how could I get the recovery partition working? Stuck.

On a cnet page, they said "a lion recovery hd partition is invisible by default. You have to enable the debug menu for disk utility, check 'show all drives/partitions', and then mount the 'invisible' partition.

To see the debug menu you have to open terminal and write:

defaults write com.apple.DiskUtility DUDebugMenuEnabled 1

Then you can select 'show all drives or partitions' within the debug menu of disk utility. After mounting the recovery hd partition of the flash drive, I selected the Recovery HD partition of the primary hdd ("Snow Leopard"), clicked "Restore", dragged the lion recovery disk partition (of the USB drive) to the "source" and the "Recovery HD" partition of the internal drive to the "destination". The recovery partition was imaged ok.

Rebooting, I held the option key and chose "Recovery HD". Works! :)

@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.

I can boot my early 2011 MBP from a SL drive made for MPB 1,1 2006. Suggest as an experiment that you clone the SL drive made on the 2009 MBP to the USB drive, set it as startup disk, and see if it will boot the new machine.

If so, you have proven that SL will run on the new machine. Then figure out if there is a problem with the netimage. (You mentioned "copying" the image - it did need to be a restore.)

One would hope that the minor hardware upgrades to CPU and GPU in late 2011 MBP wouldn't greatly affect compatibility.

Quick fix could be to clone the 2009 MBP SL drive to the new machine, since if it works, will make your life changing over a lot easier.

(FWIW, my early 2011 machine is running a new internal SSD so there is no lion stuff on it.)

I also note there are bugs in Disk Utility on the shipping version of Lion on my machine, a software update fixed that. So do update Lion if using Lion disk utility to do the netimage restore. I used SL disk utility. Have also cloned the new drive to a new partition on the shipping drive (external USB-SATA adapter) but haven't tested if it will boot.

Whoa my bad! I just reread "10.6.8 Retail disc"...that totally slipped me by.

If such a thing exists, it should work!

But I don't think one exists unless it just came out, which wouldn't really make sense since Apple is done with Snow Leo.

The Apple Store only has a 10.6.3 retail disc from the looks of it.

All other restore/install discs came with machines before Lion and will only boot the model family they came with. The chart here lists all the versions that come with machines http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1159 ... the highest looks like 10.6.7 but they aren't retail discs so much as the restore discs that came with machines before they went to Lion.

The original method of this thread was to essentially create a slipstreamed 10.6.8 master system that could be restore-cloned to another drive... but no one has gone into how to create a 10.6.8 "retail" install disc, if that's even possible.

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.)

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!😉

OK,

I went into the Applestore in London and the geniuses were able to find a 10.6.7 Macbook pro install disk (due to a return of a MBP) for my MBP. Started up from the disk and installed fine.

Only thing is that the F keys no longer map to the things they say on them, e.g., the volume and the mute buttons no longer work, nor the brightness buttons.

Also the two finger scroll doesn't seem to work so I've a bit of jiggery pokery to do before I'm happy with it.

But I do seem to have 10.6.7 up and running.

So maybe pay a visit to an Applestore before too long?

All the best.

Thanks for the tips Roy. Saved one music producer from the rather awkward situation of not being able to make music on his new mac.

The thought didn't even cross my mind that it would come loaded with lion or that it would be so difficult to revert back to snow leopard.

I ended up getting a little lost at part C and resolved the situation by putting the new mac in target mode and running the install from my old mac. I guess this process would probably negate the need fro an external drive??

thanks again

back up any information you have on lion and go into the disk utility if you click on the hard drive itself not the one that is named Macintosh HD (or whatever you have named it) but the one with more technical looking info on the right half of the window toward the top you will see a bunch of tabs that read "first aid erase Partition RAID Restore" click on the partition one and you want to change it so that there are 2 partitions formatted for mac os x extended (journaled) then once that is done restart and hold the option key during startup this will reveal your hard drive and a recovery drive for lion. insert your OS X SNOW LEOPARD disc and once it is loaded select it. when prompted to select the empty partition without lion that you just named and made. snow leopard will install on that drive and ta-da. to switch back and forth simply hold the option key at startup. use the migration assistant in snow leopard to move files from your back up of lion.

[if you cannot partition the disk while running lion, after you have inserted the os x snow leopard disc and it has booted up you can go into utilities at the top finder bar and open disk utility from there you can partition the drive but it might need to erase everything (thus the need to back up before begining this process) then go through with the install of snow leopard and reinstall lion from backup on the different partitions.]