Cannot get back to Yosemite after visiting my Snow Leopard partition.

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Cannot get back to Yosemite after visiting my Snow Leopard partition.

I upgraded to Yosemite, but I kept my small partition of Snow Leopard. I got on the Snow Leopard partition this morning to use an old program, and that worked as normal. Now that I'm done, I am stuck in Snow Leopard. I can't find Yosemite to start in that partition. It doesn't show as a startup disk. HELP!!! I feel like I have lost my computer. The Yosemite disk partition shows up in disk utility, and I verified it. However, I cannot seem to figure out anything to get it to restart into that partition.

By the way, I was looking at some other advice and tried restarting and pressing Command-R to get into Recovery Mode. That did not work at all. The Snow Leopard opened every time without going into Recovery.

iMac

Posted on Dec 4, 2014 9:50 AM

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Answer 1

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Niel

Level 10

726,863 points

Dec 4, 2014 9:53 AM in response to schpink

Restart with the Option key held down.

(117639)

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Answer 2

Dec 4, 2014 9:55 AM in response to schpink

Have you tried booting with the Option key depressed?

This should present you with the ability to see all bootable partitions on your Mac and you can then select which one to start from.

Let us know if the Yosemite partition does not appear with the Option key depressed on reboot.

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Answer 3

schpink Author

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Dec 4, 2014 12:23 PM in response to Niel

Thank you - this worked perfectly.

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Answer 4

schpink Author

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Dec 4, 2014 12:24 PM in response to Allan Eckert

Thank you - this worked perfectly.

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Answer 5

justin-T

Level 2

210 points

Dec 12, 2014 8:26 AM in response to schpink

Just wanted to add that I got to this thread after trying to boot my new 27 inch iMac (Dec 2014) into Snow Leopard from an external drive (same one I had been using to boot into SL from a 2010 iMac) and was stuck on the gray screen with dark gray Apple logo. Rebooting with option key held down (which I learned from this thread, thanks Allan and Niel) produced the desired effect, BUT the mouse pointer was frozen. After momentary panic that I might actually be permanently stuck in no-mans land, I eventually figured out I could move the selected drive back to the 2014 iMac's internal drive using the cursor keys and launch from it by hitting the return key.

Another successful use of Apple Discussions forum!

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Answer 6

Eric Root

Level 10

684,033 points

Dec 12, 2014 4:15 PM in response to justin-T

You shouldn't be booting your machine off Snow Leopard.

Install OSX Restrictions

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Answer 7

justin-T

Level 2

210 points

Dec 13, 2014 6:41 AM in response to Eric Root

Yes Eric, that's why I came here in the first place.

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Answer 8

Jan 3, 2015 4:29 PM in response to justin-T

justin-T wrote:

Just wanted to add that I got to this thread after trying to boot my new 27 inch iMac (Dec 2014) into Snow Leopard from an external drive (same one I had been using to boot into SL from a 2010 iMac) and was stuck on the gray screen with dark gray Apple logo.

The last Mac to support Snow Leopard was the 2011 iMac and 2011 MacBook Pros. Your December 2014 iMac will only boot Yosemite or later.

Snow Leopard does not recognize any OS X disc with Yosemite, at least an internal disc. I have a MacBook Pro 2011 with a partitioned internal drive. Yosemite can see both discs, and Startup Disk recognizes both discs and identifies the OS X version correctly. Under Snow Leopard, the OS X Yosemite partition is not visible in the Finder. Under Startup Disk, the Yosemite partition is incorrectly identified as 10.7. You can only boot into Yosemite from Snow Leopard by rebooting and holding the Option key to prompt the selection of startup disks, as others have pointed out. Then be sure to visit Startup Disk in Yosemite to reselect your Yosemite drive if you intend to remain in Yosemite.

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Answer 9

Mar 26, 2015 9:14 AM in response to schpink

Heads up – my experience is that restarting with the option key down, works only with a wired keyboard.

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