How do I restore my MBP running OSX 10.8.5 back to OSX 10.6.0 from DVD Install Disc?

You can.

1. Connect the old one to the new one using Target disk mode.
2. Open Disk Utility
3. When you see the mounted Volume in the sidebar of your old mac
4. Select it
5. Then Erase in Disk Utility and format as Mac OS X Extended (Journaled)
6. This will remove all contents on your old mac Volume. Make sure you select the top level drive not the separate partitions inside.
7. Once completed eject the old macbookfrom the sidebar.
8. Restart your old macbook with obviously your DVD inside and hold down C at startup. and install 10.6

Job Done 

See What to do before selling or giving away your Mac for the general considerations & procedures.

Make sure that the DVD you are trying to boot the MBP with is the one that came with it -- it should be a gray disc, not one with a picture of a Snow Leopard on it. Depending on the model, there should have been one or two of these gray system discs included with the MBP. They should be a part of the sale, since they are "bound" by the license to that specific Mac.

If you can't find the original system discs, you can either try to get a replacement set from Apple (which should help you get a better price for the MBP) or erase the MBP's hard drive securely & sell it as one with no OS installed.

sabatica wrote:

Then Erase in Disk Utility and format as Mac OS X Extended (Journaled)

This will remove all contents on your old mac Volume. Make sure you select the top level drive not the separate partitions inside.

Unless you use one of the secure erase options, this will not remove the contents of the drive, just the directory structures that point to them. That makes the content invisible & available to be written over, but utilities like Data Rescue 3 can still recover some or all of the info it contains.

Restart your old macbook with obviously your DVD inside and hold down C at startup. and install 10.6

That won't work if the DVD doesn't include a version of 10.6 that supports that MBP model. For instance, any MBP released after 2009 requires at least OS X 10.6.3 to start up, so if the DVD contains 10.6 a 2010 or later MBP can't start from it.

1. Recover data from a drive that has been reformatted without using secure Erase and then a new OS reinstalled on top. Once logged in Default admin user account and home folder etc setup. LOL. You're funny. You must have a lot of time on your hands or must have much better software than Data Rescue. That's the most ridiculous suggestion I have heard. IF you are that paranoid then why not remove the HD replace with new one and reinstall OS. Job done.

2.. He's already stated that the DVD he's using is the one shipped with the Mac.

LOL 

sabatica wrote:

1. Recover data from a drive that has been reformatted without using secure Erase and then a new OS reinstalled on top. Once logged in Default admin user account and home folder etc setup. LOL. You're funny. You must have a lot of time on your hands or must have much better software than Data Rescue. That's the most ridiculous suggestion I have heard. IF you are that paranoid then why not remove the HD replace with new one and reinstall OS. Job done.

I'm not even sure I understand what point you are trying to make but it is a well known fact that you must use a secure erase to remove the raw data from a hard drive, & that if you do not it is recoverable using commercial software made for that purpose. See for instance http://support.apple.com/kb/PH11124, which says in part:

When you delete files, the disk space that the files occupied is available for use. However, until that section of the disk is overwritten with new data, the information from the file is still on the disk and can be retrieved by programs that read raw data.

Or just open Disk Utility's help & search for "Erase a disk." In the Mountain Lion version, you will find this in the help topic titled "Erase a disk, CD, or DVD"

When erasing a disk or partition, Disk Utility does not erase the actual files; it erases only the information used to access the files. Many commonly available disk recovery apps can easily recover the files. When securely erasing a disk or partition, Disk Utility writes over the erased files, so they can never be recovered.

This is true for every version of the Mac OS, even the old classic versions before OS X was released. You don't even have to use commercial data recovery software to get the raw data if you understand how file systems work. The main benefit of commercial products like Data Rescue 3 is they contain databases of common file formats & use that to reassemble the data into ready to use files so you don't have to do that manually.

He's already stated that the DVD he's using is the one shipped with the Mac.

Actually, all he said was he had "the OSX 10.6.0 DVD." Since only a few 2009 MacBook Pros shipped with version 10.6.0 (only those built after the end of August of that year), & he has already said he can't boot from the 10.6 installer disc he has, I am guessing he is not referring to a gray system disc that shipped with his MBP model.

"When you delete files, the disk space that the files occupied is available for use. However, until that section of the disk is overwritten with new data, the information from the file is still on the disk and can be retrieved by programs that read raw data."

Hmmm.... What can possibly ovewrite files...regular use. Besides if your info means that much as I mentioned earlier "why not remove the HD replace with new one and reinstall OS. Job done."

"It's currently running the latest OSX and I want to restore it to OSX 10.6.0 which is what it shipped with when I bought it (I have the OSX 10.6.0 DVD)."

Let's not overcompicate the obvious.

Let's ask him.

Griffo IS it the system disk that came with the mac or have you created/gotten hold of a different copy?

Now I'm confused.

Mac OSX Versions in order with NAMES.

sabatica wrote:

Hmmm.... What can possibly ovewrite files...regular use.

To begin with, we aren't talking about regular use. We are talking about preparing the Mac for resale by erasing the drive & reinstalling the original OS & (presumably) the bundled apps that came with it.

A normal erase & reinstall of these items will only overwrite a relatively small amount of the hard drive, leaving the raw data on any other part of it easily recoverable by the buyer.

Secondly, you can't count on OS X automatically overwriting erased files, even in regular use. That's partially because it optimizes the file system to reduce excessive file fragmentation, which tends to favor filling up large continuous spaces with large files rather than breaking them up into a lot of little segments to fill in the spaces left by erasing smaller files. (Remember that in this context "erase" just means erasing the info used to access the file, not the file itself.)

So, unless or until the hard drive is quite full, the chances that all of a user's small "erased" document files are actually overwritten are not great, & even then segments of them containing sensitive (& easily identified) data may still be present. IOW, it isn't necessary to recover entire files, just the segments of them that contain "interesting" info. For instance, it isn't very hard to use pattern recognition tools (including those built into the OS itself) to find social security or credit card numbers among the remaining raw data because they are formatted in standardized forms. Likewise, slightly more sophisticated tools can run dictionary searches looking for things like financial transaction, medical, browser history, or similar data.

The bottom line is there is no way to be sure the drive has no recoverable data unless it is securely erased, which writes over every sector where that data might be stored. That's why the option exists, & why anyone selling their Mac should use it

I've known companies to still be able to recover Data from Securely erased drives. So that defuncts that argument. Oops.

Yes once you have the correct DVD's you will be able to boot off them and run Disk Utility to erase and reformat the internal drove then you can install the OS.

If you bought SL DVD's to upgrade from Lion you can upgrade the system to SL after the Lion install is done if you want to sell it with SL on it. But you have to stop there you can;t sell the system with anything you bought from the Mac App Store on it.

regards

Griffo wrote:

Can I assume that when I find the original (Grey) Lion install disc I'll get the option to enter disc utility and erase the HD before I re-install Lion on the MBP for sale from the DVD?

It is extremely unlikely the MBP shipped with any install discs (grey or otherwise) if it shipped with either Lion or Mountain Lion installed on it. After Snow Leopard, Apple switched to distributing Macs without any installer discs, instead relying on the Restore HD method to reinstall it if necessary.

Much more likely is that if it shipped with any installer disks they are for Leopard or Snow Leopard, depending on the model & when you bought it.

It would be helpful to know exactly which MBP you have. One way to do that (assuming Mountain Lion is currently installed on it) is to hold down the option key, click on the Apple menu & select System Information, the first item in the menu that drops down. In the window that opens, you will see its hardware info, including a line saying "Model Identifier" followed by something like "MacBookPro8,3"

What does your say?

sabatica wrote:

I've known companies to still be able to recover Data from Securely erased drives. So that defuncts that argument. Oops.

That may once have been possible but the general consensus is that even a single pass zero erase will render all the data on a modern high areal density ATA or SATA drive unrecoverable, short of using extremely advanced forensic techniques involving scanning electron microscopes that can take months to recover even small amounts of usable data … & there is not even a guarantee that will work.

If you are interested in learning more about this, I suggest starting with Guidelines for Media Sanitization or maybe even the seminal paper that started the whole thing, particularly the Further Epilogue section that says in part that recovering data from a securely erased modern drive "will most likely be a hopeless task."

Frank Caggiano wrote:

If you bought SL DVD's to upgrade from Lion you can upgrade the system to SL after the Lion install is done if you want to sell it with SL on it.

I think he means to upgrade from Leopard, not from Lion (which would be a downgrade from Snow Leopard). Sometimes it's hard to keep those cat names straight! 😝

Also note that if you bought a retail Snow Leopard installer disc & want to sell the MBP with Snow Leopard installed, you need to include that disc with the sale for licensing reasons.