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Now here’s a bizarre headscratcher. A reader’s Mac Pro was upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion, then refused to subsequently boot off the Snow Leopard DVD to reinstall the older OS on another drive. Despite many different attempts, for this one Mac it appears perhaps you can’t go home again…

I use Bryce occasionally to produce art for friend’s projects. I just discovered it crashes under Lion. DAZ, the manufacturer acknowledges the problem but has no date when the fix will be made. Thinking I could install Snow Leopard and run Bryce under it, I set up a partition on an external drive and attempted to install SL. Lion was having none of it. I also attempted to boot from the SL install disk. It was also rejected out of hand.

Thanks for any help you can provide,
Mike

Hi Mike,

Do you have the system specific version of your Snow Leopard install disc, or a retail installer? One that came bundled with a different model Mac may not work on your system.

How did you try to boot off the Snow Leopard install disc? A few ways to try: hold down the “C” key at startup; hold down the Option key at startup and select the DVD from the boot menu; or insert the DVD while booted in Lion, and choose it from the Startup Disk Preference Pane.

I have the retail version. I’ve tried:

Insert disk, click Install Mac OS X. I get a balloon reading:

You can’t use this version of the application Install Mac OS X with this version of Mac OS X. You have Install Mac OS X 23.1.

Tried booting and holding the “C” key down. The system read the disk and then ejected it and booted with Lion.

Tried selecting the SL disk as the startup disk. Rebooted, system read disk, ejected, and booted with Lion.

Tried reboot and holding down Option Key. Disk ejected when icons for HD and Recovery HD appeared. Reinserted SL disk, ejected second time.

Total bummer. Let me know if you’ve got any other ideas.

Hmmm, I can’t reproduce this behavior. I just booted my MacBook Pro running Lion from the Snow Leopard install DVD.

Was your system previously running Snow Leopard? The behavior you describe would happen if you’re trying to boot from a system disc older than what your machine supports. You might try a different SL install DVD, they came in v10.6 and v10.6.3 releases.

My system is an Early 2008 Mac Pro. I believe it came with Leopard. I update to Snow Leopard when it was released. My version is 10.6.

I’m on Maui and the level of technology understanding here is almost nonexistent. I’ll check around to see if anyone has 10.6.3 but I’m pretty sure I’m screwed.

One more thought, since it’s a Mac Pro and you can easily get at the drives: shut down and pull the hard drive containing the Lion installation. Then try booting off the SL DVD and see if it cooperates.

Maui would have other advantages, I’d imagine…

Very interesting. I pulled all the drives and rebooted. The SL disk was ejected right after the chime. I suspect the Lion install made a change to the firmware.

There are indeed offsets to the lack of technology expertise here on Maui. Thanks again for all your help.

Readers, have any additional suggestions on this topic, or corrections/clarifications on the advice above? If so, please leave your thoughts in the comments.

Got a question about your Mac or iOS device? Email (sorry, you need Javascript to see this e-mail address) and we’ll try to help out.

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Come WWDC in June, we’ll likely see OS X Lion changing status from preview to official public release. That makes May a good time to look at the April report on OS market share from web-analytics firm Net Applications for some perspective on Snow Leopard.

According to Net Applications, all versions of OS X combined reached a new high in OS market share in April, with 5.4 percent worldwide as determined by web browsing usage. The previous record was 5.33 percent, set in March 2010. Following that high, OS X declined to 4.98 percent last October before rebounding. Perhaps not coincidentally, that rebound coincided with the release of the redesigned MacBook Air, followed by new MacBook Pros this February. This isn’t to say new Mac portables were the only drivers of Snow Leopard growth. Over the course of its lifespan, Snow Leopard has seen plenty of previous Mac users upgrading, too.

Snow Leopard was released on August 28, 2009, for as little as $29 for a single-user license. Within a month, it accounted for 17 percent of the OS X market, despite being available only for Intel-based Macs. Undoubtedly, the low cost of Snow Leopard spurred adoption, but was arguably not the only reason. Leopard peaked at 71 percent of the OS X market in July 2009, before being superseded by Snow Leopard, which now accounts for 68 percent of the OS X over a similar time frame. It appears new versions of OS X do quite well whatever the price. The downside of that success, at least for users, is a likely return to a higher price. How high, and the method of distribution, may be intertwined.

Although the developer preview of Lion has been distributed through the App Store, expecting consumers to download nearly four gigabytes of data seems unreasonable, at least as the exclusive method. Other Apple software — like iWork, iLife, and Aperture — are all available at the App Store and on disc, and there’s also been an Amazon  placeholder sighting for Lion on DVD. Two methods of distribution seem possible, but perhaps not three. The redesigned MacBook Air shipped with system software on a USB drive, but the future is clearly download only. Why introduce another retail distribution method now, especially considering no USB version of Snow Leopard was offered to owners of the previous generation of the MacBook Air?

More salient, at least to anyone with more than one Mac, would be the licensing terms for downloading OS X. From the Mac App Store Terms and Conditions:

(i) You may download and use an application from the Mac App Store (“Mac App Store Product”) for personal, non-commercial use on any Apple-branded products running Mac OS X (“Mac Computer”) that you own or control.

That would effectively render the family pack version of OS X, which has always been a great deal, obsolete. The downside would be consumers with only a single Mac would be paying substantially more (if you consider cost per install) through the Mac App Store, no matter what the cost of Lion is. We’ll find out what the next version of OS X costs next month at WWDC, but how much would Lion be worth to you?

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As mac os 10.6 (snow leopard) release last 28th august, all the mac lovers are busy to upgrade. i am already using it . Soon i will share my experience.

One of the main feature of this release is the 64bit kernel.Using the following command you can check if your hardware support 64 bit kernel.

$ ioreg -l -p IODeviceTree | grep firmware-abi

Though your hardware is capable to run 64 bit kernel it don’t boot in 64 bit. In this post i will show you how to boot in 64:

1. press 6 and 4 at the boot time. (keep press the 6 and 4 key till you see the apple logo)

2.  open terminal and give this command :

$ sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot ‘Kernel Flags’ ‘arch=x86_64′

3.  open terminal and give this command :

$ sudo nvram boot-args=”arch=x86_64″

All these way will work. First one will boot 64 bit for just this time. Next 2 are permanent solution.