Nerdy Beng

Q: Problems after "upgrade" from Mountain Lion to Yosemite

My 27" iMac (2013) was recalled because there was a potential hard disk problem with that batch. Indeed the problem cropped up when I tried to back up my data.

To cut to the chase, the service center did a great job recovering and backing up everything to an external hard drive I provided. It's bootable with Mountain Lion, my original OS. However, for some reason they upgraded the iMac itself to Yosemite without asking me.

Problem: I'm not sure how the migration of applications was performed, but many crucial apps failed, like Microsoft Office, Adobe CS6, Matlab, etc.

I was able to reinstall most apps, except for Adobe. Apps in the suite didn't work, including the uninstaller. So I can't uninstall to reinstall...

Haven't tried a lot of other apps yet. I'm sure many don't work too.

Too tired of going through the mess. Yosemite is not any better for me than Mountain Lion, so I'd like to downgrade back, and transfer everything back from the external to the iMac.

I tried using Disk Utility to do that, but it failed. Didn't do anything.

Applecare hotline tells me I can't because it's not a Time Machine backup.

Questions:

1) Is that true? Are there other ways to do it?

2) Can I create a Time Machine backup of the external hard disk, and use that to replace everything on the iMac?

Thanks!

iMac, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.5)

Posted on Jan 7, 2016 10:17 PM

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Q: Problems after "upgrade" from Mountain Lion to Yosemite

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