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Downgrading from Lion to Snow Leopard on the latest Mac hardware #
Booting a new MacBook Pro (Late 2011) from a retail 10.6.3 disc resulted in a black screen and a repeating 3 beep pattern. This is due to missing Sandy Bridge drivers. Apple will ship a 10.6.6 (iMac) or 10.6.7 (MacBook Pro) installer disc* upon request which includes the necessary drivers to boot the latest models.†
As I could not wait for the disc to arrive, here is the process I followed to downgrade a new MacBook Pro (Late 2011) from Lion to Snow Leopard (see notes below for a faster method):
- Install 10.6.3 to Firewire drive connected to white MacBook (13-inch Late 2007)
- Boot white MacBook from Firewire drive with 10.6.3 and update to 10.6.8
- Boot new MacBook Pro from Firewire drive running 10.6.8
- Clone Firewire drive to internal SSD with SuperDuper! (Carbon Copy Cloner is another excellent choice)
- Boot MacBook Pro from SSD - success!
Here is an abbreviated version of Apple's Mac OS X versions (builds) for computers showing only the latest models:
| Latest model | Introduced | OS originally included | OS included later |
| iMac (Mid 2011) | May 2011 | 10.6.6 | 10.6.7,10.7 |
| Mac Mini (Mid 2011) | Jul 2011 | 10.7 | |
| Mac Pro (Mid 2010) | Aug 2010 | 10.6.4 | 10.7 |
| MacBook Pro (Late 2011) | Oct 2011 | 10.7.2 | |
| MacBook Air (Mid 2011) | Jul 2011 | 10.7 |
See also Finding your Mac OS X version and build information.
Notes & Updates:
- * These machine-specific installers can be made universal as well: Make a universal 10.6.7 Snow Leopard installer.
- † I have successfully tested the 10.6.7 MacBook Pro installer DVD on a Late 2011 MacBook Pro purchased Feb 2012.
- Reportedly, a MacBook Pro 10.6.8 image can boot the latest Mac Mini as well.
- Roy Miller explains how to slipstream 10.6.8 into a 10.6.3 image via NetRestore. Note that System Image Utility 10.6.8 is found in Server Admin Tools 10.6.8, not in Mac OS X 10.6.8 Update Combo v1.1, as mistakenly mentioned in the "Required resources" section.
- Found a fixed and formatted version of Roy's instructions, along with a Target Disk Mode method that is much faster than using an external drive.
- Recap of downgrade methods and performance notes
- Apparently OS X system drives are largely universal, generally booting any Mac of the same basic generation.
- Apple strongly discourages downgrading: Don't install a version of Mac OS X earlier than what came with your Mac
/mac | Nov 24, 2011
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