Installing Snow Leopard (and Rosetta) in Parallels 7 in Lion - PART ONE

Good work Michael. I shall be linking to this!

🙂

My experience in following up on the assistance offered by MichaelLAX has been 100% positive. In addition to solving some huge problems for me, Michael was more than generous with his time expended guiding me through the initial installation and set up.

I’m now running Snow Leopard with full Rosetta function within Parallels Desktop on an OS X 10.7.3 Lion system. It works!

For those needing Rosetta after upgrading to Lion, some have suggested continuing to run Snow Leopard on a separate partition or on an external drive. This might be a satisfactory, but somewhat cumbersome, solution for some users, but I believe this will work only on Macs which have not had Lion preinstalled. I also have an old G4 PowerMac still running Tiger OS X 10.4 11 (and not upgradeable), but this machine won’t last forever. The above “solution” will be compatible with a new Mac purchased in the future.

I’m the professional landscape photographer to whom Michael referred in some previous posts.

In early March I began investigating the implications of Apple’s iCloud (and Lion) changes, mainly because of concerns about maintaining my @mac.com email address. I have no reason to doubt the assurances of some posters on these forums that such mail will continue to work with Mac Mail in Snow Leopard after making manual account settings changes – even after June 30th. On the other hand I received four different opinions from the four Apple representatives I queried about this issue in March.

I depend on some legacy PPC only software for my business – software which will never be upgraded to Universal or Intel versions and for which there are no substitutes or alternatives.

Many high grade film scanners were long ago discontinued, or the manufacturers have exited that business. I also have many old AppleWorks drawing documents which cannot be opened in Pages. The Lion compatible (Intel) versions of some essential utilities for my Epson 4880 printer were released by Epson last December (Epson LFP Remote Panel and Epson Printer Watcher), but these updates are missing many of the useful functions of the previous PPC versions. A fully functional Intel version of the software for my i1 Display 2 colorimeter hardware, used to calibrate monitors, won't be available until September.

From June 15th until late September I’ll be in a remote location in Montana where dial-up is the only practical option. I’ve had to purchase a new modem (ZOOM 3095) since my Apple USB modem (purchased from the Apple Store in June 2009) won’t work on MacBook Pros with Lion installed (even when running the above Parallels “solution”). The “Safe Place” software that I had been using for years to store 189 encrypted passwords is PPC only. It required a full day to transcribe this data into the newly purchased 1Password application.

I could provide several further examples. This entire experience, except for my contact with MichaelLAX, has left a bitter taste and consumed an inordinate amount of time. Most of my friends and acquaintances who are Mac users have been completely unaware of these pending issues. I think that subsequent to June 30 there will be many who are completely surprised – and a resulting PR fiasco.

Hello,

seems that apple changed anything during the last updates, also for 10.7

I still use PD 7 and my installed 10.6.8 worked fine for the past years.

Since some days, it won't start - with upcoming error-Message "An invalid Version of Mac OS has been installed".

Is there any kind of ... workaround for this?

I only need SnowLew some times for the mast few apps and don't want to waste 100 bucks für the server-version...

Thanks!

Thank yo very much!

This links solved my Problem. (You can use any MacOS-Version to fix this issue...)

Your advise is correct not to save important data inside a VM.

I only need 10.6 for _one_ application and save the results outside...

MlchaelLAX wrote:

For reasons that have been expressed very often on this forum (primarily Rosetta and the ablitity to run PPC-apps) many people have been asking me to put together in one place the results of my research on this topic. I have taken all of the research that I have found, and refined and improved much of it.

This thread, as Part One, will look at the long process for completing this result; the so-called "not easily accomplished in three steps" process. It will be followed later by my and hopefully others, suggestions for the "easy" way.

Why the long process first?

• Some people appreciate being able to roll up there sleeves, do it yourself and achieve the satisfaction that comes from successful completion of the project;

• Just like I have made improvements to what I found in my research, I expect others will offer improvements to what I have to offer; and

• If the "easy" way is offered first, there will be little encouragement to improve the long process.

What is needed:

• Installation of Parallels 7 in your Lion computer - I will expect this step has already been completed.

• A fresh copy of the Snow Leopard Installation DVD (and not a machine specific, nor restore disk that may have come with your computer).

• Use of the programs Disk Utility and Terminal, both of which are in the /Applications/Utitities/ folder.

What are the steps that will be taken:

1. Preparation of the Snow Leopard Installation DVD for use in Parallels 7

2. Installation of Snow Leopard into Parallels 7 (and optionally installing Parallel Tools)

3. Upgrading Snow Leopard to 10.6.8 and other available upgrades

4. Creating a backup of the completed process.

I will be offering each step, one at a time...