Reinstalling Snow Leopard from Yosemite

[John Rofrano]

[Simon Moorhead] “I have my original Mac sorta up discs, but I also have a Snow Leopard DVD.
Can I reinstall Snow Leopard-will this fix my problems? If so, how can I do it.”

There is no “uninstall” so you have a bit of work to do but it is possible.

Do you have a Time Machine backup? You could recover from that. Re-install Snow Leopard from the DVD and restore your files and apps via Time Machine. I believe that will not restore Yosemite, only your files and leave Snow Leopard in place.

If not, get an empty external drive that is the same size as your boot drive or larger. Use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a copy of your boot drive onto the external drive. Then boot with the Snow Leopard DVD and erase your boot drive and re-install Snow Leopard. When it gets to the point where it asks if you want to migrate from another Mac, plug in the external drive and select the option to migrate from another drive. Choose that drive and it will copy your files and apps onto your new Snow Leopard boot drive.

You should now have a fresh Snow Leopard installation with all of your files and applications as they were before. If it all works, use Carbon Copy Cloner to make an exact copy of your new Snow Leopard drive and keep it in a “safe place”. 😉

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[Simon Moorhead]

Thank you for the advice.

I will buy a large drive to sort that out and give it a go.
Many thanks

[John Rofrano]

You’re welcome. Post back if you have any other questions.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[Simon Moorhead]

Hi There,

I am having a few problems recovering the backup.
I backed up my whole drive onto Time Machine onto an external drive. I rebooted the system to install Snow Leopard-it seems to have worked, but I cannot get Time machine to recognise the drive where the back up is. It is on the desktop, and I can see the backup files, but I can’t get it to reinstall the backup with time machine.

Any help or suggestions gratefully received!
Thanks

[John Rofrano]

[Simon Moorhead] “I backed up my whole drive onto Time Machine onto an external drive. I rebooted the system to install Snow Leopard-it seems to have worked, but I cannot get Time machine to recognise the drive where the back up is.”

Sorry I wasn’t clearer in my instructions. ?

I did not mean for you to MAKE a Time Machine backup. I asked if you already HAD a Time machine backup from Snow Leopard. What probably happened is that the Time Machine format has changed from Snow Leopard to Yosemite and the older Snow Leopard cannot read the newer Yosemite format. That’s why I said that if you didn’t have a Time Machine backup that you should CLONE your entire hard drive to a new one and restore from that.

You may have to go forward to go backward! In other words, you may need to actually re-install Yosemite, recover from the Time Machine backup and then clone your entire drive with Carbon Copy Cloner to a new drive. Then follow my second suggestion which is to re-install Snow Leopard and when prompted, Migrate from another Drive (the drive you cloned).

If that doesn’t work, you can at least copy your files from the cloned drive to the new drive manually which is something you cannot do with a Time Machine backup. So the next step is probably to install Yosemite and try again.

Once again, I’m sorry my original instructions were not clearer.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[Simon Moorhead]

Ah that makes sense.
Ok- I will try that next.
I actually do not have the time machine backup from Snow Leopard as I deleted it to make space for the back up from Yosemite I made this week! Oh well. I will reinstall Yosemite and try again.
Many thanks

[Simon Moorhead]

HI,
thanks for the advice so far.
I did the carbon copy cloner and it seems to work ok-I then set about updating to 10.6.8.
All ok until I got to the restart after installing 10.6.4-the this happened to the screen

I have restarted several times by holding down the power button, but I cannot get it to respond at all like this.
Any suggestions thank you?

[John Rofrano]

Wow, that is really strange. I wonder if it’s a graphics card driver problem? Are you using an Apple graphics card or did you put a 3rd party card in? I’ve seen strangeness like this on my own Mac and I haven’t tracked it down to anything specific yet. It only happens once in a while and a reboot usually cures it but in your case I guess that doesn’t work.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com