How do I restore Vault created under Snow leopard to new IMac with Maverick 10.9.2

Purchased a new IMac with OS 10.9.2

trying to restore an Aperture Vault (created by snow leopard) I get error message that Vault could not be restored because it was created by older OS.

What exactly is the error message? The operating system version should not matter, when restoring from a vault. What however will matter, are the version of Aperture and the file system of the disk with the vault. Is your vault on an external drive? If yes, how is the drive formatted? If the vault is not on a drive formatted MacOS Extended (Journaled), move it to a disk with the correct formatting and try again.

And what version of Aperture created your vault? With SnowLeopard you probably used an older Aperture version. Then your vault needs to be upgraded to a newer Aperture version, before you can restore from it. Do you still have a version of Aperture installed, that is the same version as your vault? Was it an Aperture 3 version?

If your vault is an Aperture 3 vault, try to open it as an Aperture library instead of restoring it.

- a quick and dirty emergency measure: Try to open your vault directly on the drive where it is now without restoring it. Make a backup copy of your vault, before you try it.

• Change the filename extension of your vault to ".aplibrary", this will turn the vault into an Aperture library and try to open it directly in Aperture by double clicking it.
• Aperture will now try to open the vault as the current Aperture library and upgrade it.

“Aperture Vault” was created by an older version of Aperture, and cannot be restored by this version.