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

Roy,

Great post, we have been researching this for a while, originally contemplating minis and reverting, but this may be a better option with an iMac. I have a couple questions for you:

• Do you know if the applecare warranty is Void, or if there is just no suport when installing SL on a Lion iMac?
• Have you done any geekbench scores to know if permance has been affected at all? I know with the minis being reverted via target disk mode, that they are suffering some significant performace issues. Likely as disucssed related to Lion hardware not being able to access drivers from SL install.

FOR ALL: Having read the posts on the mini revert and this, it seems that, as Roy says, there many be many paths to the end result, it would interesting to see if anyone has reverted their iMac using the Target disk mode method in it's entirety, posted here, third last post:

Thanks again Roy for all your help in posting details isntructions, and following up on the postings to provide feedback to us all, it is much appreciated.

I installed SL on a imac preinstalled with lion 7.1 (or is it 7.0.1). Anway i used a macbook core 2 duo running 10.6.7 and booted the imac in TDM. once the imac hd was mounted on my macbook as TDM, i partioned the drive using disk utility on my macbook and I installed the mac box set SL 10.6.3 on the parition i created. It booted, finished up installing, i entered all the setup info, did all the updates (all of this via my macbook) and then restarted the imac while holding down the option key and selecting that parition with SL on it. It booted fine and reran software update, updated and it installed fine. Tested keyboard keys, etc making sure verything was working. At this point i was able to dual boot into 10.7/10.6.8. I went into TDM via my macbook again and deleted the lion parition but then it did not allow me to resize the SL parition. So now i have 2 partitions and can't figure out how to make it one. I also ran the 32 bit free geekbench app and am getting half the score for this model.

My theory is since i was using a core 2 duo machine, it perhaps did not install software for a quad core. I was considering running 10.6.8 again on the imac not sur eif that will help. Does anyone know if the system retore discs for this 2011 model has 10.6.7 or something else?

My questions are:

Does anyone know

a) how to make it one parition again

b)get the benchmark score to be the right on.

c) Does time machine make an backup image file. i ran Tm backing up this partition

@williamfromkailua There are no serial numbers or identifying characteristics about the SL family packs that I know of. You're essentially buying the license/right to install Snow Leo on 10 computers. Of course, in my opinion since many of these machines were still supposed to come with the Snow Leo discs with a free option to upgrade to Lion, I think Apple owes you 😉 But yeah, you can use the same master restore to clone out to all 9 machines.That's the beauty of Roy's method: it's made for situations like yours!

Good call on the Firewire 800 to 400 dongle... I had to get one of those too and is worth mentioning for those intending to put their MBP 11 into target disc mode but connected to another machine that only has FW400.

@zirkenz did you look into a third-party partitioner like iPartition? I never figured out how to avoid a total repartitioning when faced with an unwanted partition like you have.

Although you could use the partition to test your geekbench scores by installing another Snow Leo round to the phantom partiiton. You'd have to make it bigger but you could see if there was just something strange in your install... you could try the new round installing only the 10.6.8 update. Did you happen to run a geekbench under Lion... it might not be much of a comparison but it would be interesting information to have.

Another way you might approach this is to upgrade your Core2Duo MBP to 10.6.8 and put IT into target disc mode. You should be able to boot your iMac '11 using your Core2Duo MBP's hard drive! Crazy but once it's at 10.6.8, your iMac '11 should be able to boot from it. Then you could see if your geekbench somehow runs better when using your Core2Duo's drive running on the iMac '11. At least for comparison.

Of course an easier test would be to use your Core2Duo to boot your iMac'11 drive one more time and geekbench from C2D MBP and compare it to your built-in C2D's hard drive geekbench... maybe there's something slow with your install or with your hard drive(s).

Great stuff Roy, I can dig it! All of it. Hopefully Zirkenz didn't get eaten by his computer 😉

@zirkenz, any progress with "the method"? As Roy implies, it's good that your machine is scoring in the 5000's while you sort this out because that's what my i5 does and it feels nice and zippy. So at least you can sort this on a fast machine 😉 If you really should be clocking in the 10,000s though, I see your hunger for more speed. Totally.

It'll satisfy ME to know when you've got "the method" sorted out because then, if you still get the same low scores, you might actually start to suspect your hardware! When all is said and done, you may have to either re-acquire Lion (you might still be eligible for the up-to-date upgrade/download for Lion) just to test your hardware and/or request/order the factory disc for your iMac that has Snow Leo. Then you can have complete peace of mind and determine if there's something wrong with your hardware. Ideally the method will "just work."

Related aside, you could download the free preference pane "MenuMeters" (I still prefer it over iStat for some reason) ... you go into the System Preferences preference pane, once it's installed , and you can turn on a view of your processors... it will show you your individual cores and threads if you tell it to... I don't know how many should show up for your processor, but you can see how hard your cores are working. (I also turn on network activity so I can see what's uploading and downloading from my machines at-a-glance)

The "Activity Monitor" app will let you know about what's running in the background, taking up RAM and CPU. And the Apple System Profiler (sp) will tell you things like how your RAM and other hardware is showing up.

I know it's anxious business not having something that should "just work" just work. If I had a nickel for every..... 😉 But soon you will have this all resolved, one way or another, and can move on to the next challenge. It's crazy what machines drive us to... I swear I once troubleshot MobileMe for 2 years with a client, off and on, and it never worked...until we finally reformatted EVERYthing (a server, a laptop, and two devices) -- ridiculous -- we both started tearing up because it was finally syncing. So I know man, it really really shouldn't be this hard BUT I figure we're only in 2011 and I think the promise of 2050 is not flying cars but computers that do, finally, just work...that'll be the true revolution lol.

Good luck to us all in the meantime!

Thank you for doing all that @zirkenz. Truly epic!

I'd be curious about the results of an Xbench test.

System Profiler will show you how your RAM, HD, processor, etc. post up

Activity Monitor (set to show all processes) can give you a sense of the processes running ... I sort it so the most intensive CPU processes are at the top. There are also little graphs depicting how your memory is being used.

Something like MenuMeters will show you a view of each of your cores/threads and how hard they are working...

You can try booting into Safe Mode and running Geekbench....

But it sounds like your next step would be re-installing Lion (or installing Lion to a bootable external drive) so that you can see if your Geekbenches are working alright under Lion.

Usually if OSX doesn't like the machine it's running on, it won't even boot or it will kernel panic almost immediately. It's amazing to me that Apple would cripple the ability of its own software to run on its own compatible machines while others are getting OSX to run fantastically on machines it was never designed for. Is this Apple intentionally controlling how its computers are run to a whole new level? An automatic leftover from a habit of control? Or is it really some other problem (e.g. hardware)?

Merry Monday Roy 😉

Regarding TDM (Target Disc Mode) and TDM Installs:

Historically you could literally hook up an OSX drive -- external or TDM -- to another machine and could happily boot and run from the drive, as long as the new host machine were capable of running the OS to begin with. All of the drivers are present in each OSX and the external/TDM drive would automatically detect its host at boot and boot up.

If you look in /System/Library/Extensions (look but don't touch!) this is where the highest level drivers for our systems live. You will see, for example, dozens of video card drivers for machines other than the one you are using. One would think that if the installer targets specific model Macs, it would only install those video card drivers relevant to the model, not ones for every other Mac model that the OS can support. And yet, there they are!

Maybe Apple has changed its methods with the advent of Sandybridge processors and I can't speak to Lion, but historically external systems (on USB drives, Firewire, or TDM) could be booted to any Mac that could handle the OS level. I've relied on this feature many many times.

Often the first thing I did with a new computer is remove the stock drive and put in my original drive, from my old machine, and the computer would boot right up, no problems.

I confess I never ran Geekbenches under these various conditions to see if the system were running more slowly, but I never noticed. No kernel panics, no stability issues... trust me, you would know pretty fast if your Mac didn't like your OS 😉

I'm not saying Apple can't have changed all this but historically they seem to install a "universal system."

YMMV 😉

Super thorough!!!!

Wow.

Okay... Glad your hardware is fine.

So it sounds like even though your iMac does not have a little "New" flag on it in the Apple Store, that it still didn't make some cut that the MBP's seem to have made.

Possibly only the Macbook Pros and Mac Pros are running at full speed on Snow Leo. The New-mini folk and some (most? all?) iMac folk must be in the same boat.Grrrrr.

If you look for your iMac at http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/ it looks like there were multiple firmware updates for graphics and, as an aside, apparently Apple rigged the hard drive so you can't easily replace it yourself. Usually they're not this draconian (although opening some of these babies up isn't always a picnic).

You may have to reach out to the open-mac community to crack this nut. It's probably not really firmware that's in your way, but a combination of kernel, drivers (kexts)... the only way to get your iMac to work like a Mac, may be to start treating it like an Intel box!

Hi all,

I have followed the tip of others and got myself a 10.6.7 disc specific to my new iMac from applecare. Installed, and it brought up to ful speed, but I do not notice any change in operating speed, so likely it is a superficial thing.

Anyways, jsut figured I would post for others, getting a disc is possible, and installing OVER my 10.6.8 netinstall worked fine.

Good luck all.

Josh

Roy,

I did some research and I found that AMD Radeon HD 6770M, that comes now with the brand new MacBook Pro 17 is already present in some iMac shipped in May 2011 with 10.6.7 installed. So the drivers of this new card should be present in last Snow Leopard release 10.6.8.

Looks like there is no other change besides the graphics card and the processor speeds.

Knowing the driver is included, I only have to know if the last firmware included will let this new MacBook Pro startup with 10.6.8

Many thanks!!!!

Ivan

Very new macs may not support a default install of SL. I would like to ask you ‘why did you buy it if you wish SL and only SL?’. but am not going to ask you that. I cannot bet I am right, but I may write about my installing Tiger on my first MBA some 3 years ago. That machine came with 10.5.1, therefore Tiger could not be installed. I did the following trick, from curiosity (also wished to test my Apple intelligence):

- Installed an intel Tiger unto an external drive using a MacBook, which natively supported Tiger

- when ready, connected external drive to MBA, restarted and booted from the external drive

- it worked!

- Rebooted from genuine MBA install DVD, made two partitions of the disk

- cloned the Tiger external disk unto one partition of the internal MBA disk

- Booted into Tiger running natively on that Air

All was OK. My curiosity was satisfied, all worked, my native intelligence was also well appreciated.

I cannot bet this trick may work for you, but you may try. Depending on your ability to repeat the same steps with newer OSs, but in similar circumastances, it may take several hours. If this works, go ahead.

Just for my curiosity: why would you like to revert to SL on a very new mac machine?

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.

My situation was straightforward. I used my wife's early 2011 macbook pro 13", which came with Snow Leopard, so this may not add a much to the discussion. My late 2011 macbook 13" (2.4GHz) arrived a few days ago with Lion. I connected an external USB drive to the new macbook pro. That drive contained a clone of my wife's drive (early macbook pro). It booted Snow Leopard fine. While I consider my subjective feel of a computer to be more important than benchmarks, I will use Geekbench (64-bit) here for reference since scores have been mentioned earlier in these discussions.

Her early 2011 MBP running the factory installed Snow Leopard scored 6546. My late 2011 MBP running Snow Leopard from the external USB drive scored 6532. My late 2011 MBP running the factory Lion scored 6709. I cloned my wife's Snow Leopard to a new OCZ 3 128GB SSD and put it in the late 2011 MBP, along with a RAM upgrade to 8GB. The score of the upgraded late 2011 MBP running Snow Leopard was 6815. I changed the user and migrated my apps and files, so I now have a late 2011 MBP running the way I want it.