Can 2010 13" handle Lion?

I can't really provide a solution but I can tell you from personal experience as an owner that this Mac is perfectly capable of running Lion. I would venture and wonder if the partition has something to do wit it but that probably doesn't make sense at all

It might, it might not, it's relative to the user.

IMO anything pre-early 2011 shouldn't run Lion, 2010 is on the borderline, and 2009 and earlier should stay on 10.6.

Also if you installed Lion into Partiton #2 it's going to run slower as those sectors on the second half of the drive are slowe than the ones on the first 50% of the drive where Partition #1 is.

Lion is also slower than Snow Leopard on the same hardware freshly installed, it's likely gotten even slower as the updates have gone on.

Now just to have you know, when you installed Lion, IT CHANGED the partiton map and installed a Lion Recovery Partiton at the bottom of the drive.

What this means is YOU CAN"T use the 10.6 disk or 10.6 Disk Utiliy to perform repairs on the drive anymore as 10.6 doesn't know what the Lion Recovery is or why the partiton map has been altered.

So the only way to fix your drive in the future is to take all the data off, erase the whole drive from the 10.6 disk and set things up again.

You might be running into a future problem if you installed Lion on Parititon #2, what if you want to go to Lion completely, now what?

You can't detete Partition #1 with 10.6 because you can only merge downwards, not upwards in Disk Utiilty on Lion.

So you need ot learn how to clone, so you can clone off 10.6 or 10.7 off their partitions, Lion Recovery boot and then delete Parittion #2, merge it with Partiton #1 and reverse clone 10.7 back on.

read more here

https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks/macbook_pro?view=documents

Yes, but you need to erase the entire drive (10.6 instlal disk) by selecting the makers name and size on the far left in Disk Utility, that's so you erase the Lion Recovery and 10.7 partiton map and rebuild a 10.6 compatible parittion map.

Once you do that you can create as many as 16 partitions on the drive, install 10.6 into a max of 4 of them. LOL The good old days.

This business with Lion altering things is so people can command r boot into Lion Recovery as there are no boot disks with Lion.

If you can boot off the 10.5 disk you can certainly install it into a parittion on 10.6 drive, as long as the machine originally came with the 10.5 disks it should be able to boot.

Sometimes there is a firmware change that will break older OS X install disks, 10.5 might be one of them.

RaySkater wrote:

Lemme ask you, tho...why are your own requirements for hardware that can run Lion so strict as "nothing before 2011?"

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20091204-263/graphics-issues-plaguing-os-x- 10.7-lion-upgrades/

Does this have to do with video chipsets, or CPU or just plain computer muscle?

A bit of both problems and older less powerful hardware.

With 2011+ models, Apple tested them to work with 10.7, not so with earlier models.

With apologies for some cross-posting …

I read that it's possible to have more than sixteen partitions, and boot from all those partitions.

However: for breathing space, I might recommend no more than fifteen.

In Ask Different: Why should I observe a limit of sixteen partitions per disk with OS X?