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iMac and Me
Mar. 25th, 2012 06:07 pmI finally was able to install Snow Leopard on my new iMac that came with Lion. How? Oh, it was interesting.
Because the new iMac came out after the retail release of Snow Leopard, the Snow Leopard installation disc contained no drivers for the new iMac, and can't be used to directly install to the new iMac. The recovery partition that the latest Macs have also throws it for a loop.
On the advice of a Mac forum user, I connected the new iMac to another iMac that currently had Snow Leopard installed, using firewire and Targeted Mode (targeted mode allows a Mac that is connected to another Mac via firewire to show up as an external hard drive.) I then attempted to install to the iMac as if it were an external drive. As I was told, this was the way to do it.
But it didn't work. Half way through the installation, the computer rebooted (I'm not sure why, but it did it every time) and once it started back up, it would error out because the installation drive would be seen as invalid. This happened twice before I gave up.
My next attempt was to use an actual external hard drive and install Snow Leopard to it. (Macintoshes have always been fluid about where the operating system can be installed and what they can boot from- heck, the latest models, if the recovery partition isn't present will connected to Apple headquarters to boot from their network and reinstall the operating system!)
This worked, and I applied the full OS patch I had downloaded from Apple earlier, and then attempted to boot the new iMac from the external drive. Success!
Now, I figured, I could run the new iMac off the external drive and install Snow Leopard to it's hard drive. No luck - once again the machine rebooted and errored out.
This has all involved about 3-4 hours of work. I'm fed up and ready to give up, when the solution starts to form in my head (I truly love my problem solving skills- they're like this super power that kicks in when I'm not expecting it but need them the most.)
At first, I was thinking I could use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the external drive to the iMac's internal drive. I was worried that this would wipe out the recovery partition as well, which would probably send me right back to square one. So, I thought, I'll just use Time Machine, the built-in mac backup program, to make a backup of the external drive onto a different drive, then I'll disconnect the external drive, boot into Recovery mode, where there is an option to restore from a Time Machine backup, and restore that backup to the internal hard drive.
And by gum, it worked!
I just wish I'd thought of that in the first place.
Because the new iMac came out after the retail release of Snow Leopard, the Snow Leopard installation disc contained no drivers for the new iMac, and can't be used to directly install to the new iMac. The recovery partition that the latest Macs have also throws it for a loop.
On the advice of a Mac forum user, I connected the new iMac to another iMac that currently had Snow Leopard installed, using firewire and Targeted Mode (targeted mode allows a Mac that is connected to another Mac via firewire to show up as an external hard drive.) I then attempted to install to the iMac as if it were an external drive. As I was told, this was the way to do it.
But it didn't work. Half way through the installation, the computer rebooted (I'm not sure why, but it did it every time) and once it started back up, it would error out because the installation drive would be seen as invalid. This happened twice before I gave up.
My next attempt was to use an actual external hard drive and install Snow Leopard to it. (Macintoshes have always been fluid about where the operating system can be installed and what they can boot from- heck, the latest models, if the recovery partition isn't present will connected to Apple headquarters to boot from their network and reinstall the operating system!)
This worked, and I applied the full OS patch I had downloaded from Apple earlier, and then attempted to boot the new iMac from the external drive. Success!
Now, I figured, I could run the new iMac off the external drive and install Snow Leopard to it's hard drive. No luck - once again the machine rebooted and errored out.
This has all involved about 3-4 hours of work. I'm fed up and ready to give up, when the solution starts to form in my head (I truly love my problem solving skills- they're like this super power that kicks in when I'm not expecting it but need them the most.)
At first, I was thinking I could use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the external drive to the iMac's internal drive. I was worried that this would wipe out the recovery partition as well, which would probably send me right back to square one. So, I thought, I'll just use Time Machine, the built-in mac backup program, to make a backup of the external drive onto a different drive, then I'll disconnect the external drive, boot into Recovery mode, where there is an option to restore from a Time Machine backup, and restore that backup to the internal hard drive.
And by gum, it worked!
I just wish I'd thought of that in the first place.
