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How to downgrade from Mountain Lion to Leopard/Snow Leopard

Hello we upgraded to Mountain Lion and now IDVD and Applie iWorks 6 no longer works, how can we go back to Leopard or Snow Leopard smoothly? What all do we need to do this? Thank you!

iMac, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)

Posted on Dec 11, 2012 7:29 AM

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Posted on Dec 11, 2012 7:39 AM

What version of OS X was installed on the computer when it originally arrived? If it was Snow Leopard or earlier then you can find loads of tutorial by using Google. For example here is one I located on Youtube.com


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEpLYQ4RNDM

69 replies

Dec 11, 2012 8:17 AM in response to ljoyner03

Here are some instuctions:

Installing OS X Snow Leopard on an External Hard Drive

The steps to install Snow Leopard onto an external hard drive are very similar to the steps of booting OS X from a USB drive. In fact, if you have a large enough USB flash drive, you can use these same steps to install Snow Leopard on to it. This 128 GB USB Flash Drive can service just as well as a normal External Hard Drive, and may even run a bit faster than your typical HD.

  1. Insert the OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard DVD into your Mac, or boot into the USB Snow Leopard Installation we described in an earlier post.
  2. Open system preferences from the menu bar, select start up disks and then the OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Install DVD. Click the restart button to start the installation process
  3. After your computer restarts continue through the introduction and agreement pages
  4. The External Hard Drive won’t currently be an option for installation so we’ll need to use Disk Utility to make some configuration changes. Select Utility from the Menu Bar to access Disk Utility.
  5. Once Disk Utility opens, select the External Hard Drive you’d like to install Snow Leopard onto and then Select Partition. From here select 1 Partition and then click Options. To allow the Mac to boot from the external hard drive, the drive must be setup with a GUID Partition Table. Select GUID.
  6. To make sure that you don’t mistake the External Drive for your normal Hard Drive, be sure to name the Volume something like “Snow Leopard”. Apply the changes and continue to the next step
  7. Exit DisK Utility and the installation window will return asking which volume you’d like to install snow leopard onto. Select the External Hard Drive that we partitioned with GUID (Named Snow Leopard) to continue the installation. Follow the instruction until the installation is complete.

Snow Leopard Installation Time

Once the installation to my External Hard Drive started, it took 30 minutes to complete. The total install time including setting up the External Hard Drive as a GUID bootable device took close to 40 minutes.

This time depends completely on your computer settings and hard drive speeds.

External Hard Drive Snow Leopard Speed

I’ll be the first to admit that I was amazed at the speed of the OS on the External Hard Drive. I expected Snow Leopard to run slower than the native hard drive but that wasn’t the case. Safari opened quickly, finder also was zippy, and the dock functioned without any speed issues. Moving files around and creating video with Quicktime X worked flawlessly.

It functioned so well that I’ve decided to do a fresh install on to my internal hard drive on my Mac. I’ll backup the data on the drive and follow the steps listed above but will select my internal hard drive as the volume.

Dec 11, 2012 8:26 AM in response to Jeff Nitschke

Jeff this is great, I will definitely use this method when I get home. Last question, when you startup your computer and login is that when you can choose if you want to use the external or internal drive or do you have to do something different to switch back and forth? Also when I use the external will I have to move all my applications over and files over or can I just pull them.

How to downgrade from Mountain Lion to Leopard/Snow Leopard

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