Once the old Mac was booted, then I plugged in the Firewire cable, and the old Mac suddenly had the new Mac's drives on its desktop, just like any other external drives. I left the Firewire cable out of the old Mac, and just booted it up. It will not boot into a GUI.īy the way, did you ever notice how similar the Firewire logo is to the radiation warning triform? Neither did I, until I started this little project:Īnyway, now that your new Mac is booted up and in target mode, boot up your old Mac. If you hold down the T key, the new Mac will boot up and display the Firewire logo on its screen. This, by the way, is a very cool Mac feature that - at least to the best of my knowledge - Windows doesn't have. This places the machine into "target" mode, which essentially turns the computer into an external hard drive. Plug the Firewire cable into the new, Lion-based Mac and turn it on while at the same time holding the T key. Be sure to find a Firewire 800 cable (at least my new Mac mini server doesn't support the old Firewire 400 cables). Make sure you have your new Lion-based Mac and your old Mac on your desk. So, I'm holding off the snark, for now at least. I could say something here about Apple products being easy to use, but the last time I said something negative about Apple, a bunch of acolytes tried to get me fired. I'm not sure you can back-rev your new Lion machine if you don't already have another Mac lying around. Madly mixed metaphors (and a little sacrilege aside), here's what you do, courtesy of jsmac2 and the fine folks on the Apple Support Communities.įirst, as it turns out, you're going to need two Macs to pull this off. Preparing to install Snow Leopard on your brand-new Lion machine « Previous: My first attempt at Snow Leopard Next: Preparing to install Snow Leopard on Lion » And so it came to pass that, with the help of the divine posters of the online board brotherhood, the Lion laid itself down upon the firmament and let the Snow Leopard boot unto the sacred Macintosh. I can type a sequence of characters into a text field on a Web site called "The Google" and, upon my command, magical elves will scour the entire world, seeking what I need to know.Īs is often the case, the deep truths we seek can be found in discussion boards.Īnd so it was. And I did.įortunately, I have certain super-powers. As far as I could tell, this makes it impossible for the Snow Leopard DVD to boot on a Lion-prepared machine and install. I'm guessing this will also be a problem for those who upgrade to Lion, since the recovery partition is created automatically. Snow Leopard's installer hangs when trying to load on a new Lion-based machine.Īpparently, Snow Leopard gets very confused when it sees the Lion restore partition on the new Mac's hard drives. I finally decided to reboot the system, and try again. I booted from the external DVD drive, saw the Apple logo load off the Snow Leopard DVD, and. I held down the Option key (which is Mac-speak for "let me choose which disk to boot from"). Fortunately, I have a spare USB-based external DVD drive, so I plugged that into the Mac mini, loaded the disk, and booted. First, of course, the Mac mini server doesn't have a media slot. Installing Snow Leopard on the Lion-based Mac mini server proved to be more trouble than I expected. This was a very nice store, but you can see how Apple supports its non-Apple branded retailers - I had received my new Lion-based Mac mini before the store got their first new Lion-based machine from last week's new model introductions. This retailer pre-dates the Apple-owned stores and has still managed to hang on in the face of Apple's retail competition. I finally found a copy of Snow Leopard at a local Apple-specialist store, Visual Dynamics. In any case, after looking on Apple's site and looking on Amazon, calling my not-really-local Apple Store (it's an hour and a half away if traffic's on your side), and checking with all the Best Buys within an hour drive, I struck out.
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