Downgrading Snow Leopard to Leopard and why!
Added by 55disk on 2 September 2009
After installing Snow Leopard (in haste) I haven’t found anything that exceptional to keep it going in the face of my main app not working, Adobe Photoshop CS3!
Adobe Photoshop CS3 crashes all the time, I just can’t keep up the workflow with this happening. Adobe don’t support CS3 on Snow Leopard and actually don’t tend to support older versions of there programs for newer operating systems. I have even tried the trial version of CS4 and that crashes too, so I’m left with no other option other than to downgrade Snow Leopard to Leopard!
I wish I had made a backup of Leopard before installing the newer Snow Leopard, I do have a copy but its four weeks since my last backup (let that be a warning to me and others on backing up before you install a new operating OS!!!).
Here’s what you do:
1. clone your drive as is right now – use either Super Duper of Carbon Copy Cloner, I have used the later numerous times and works great!
2. Pop in your Leopard Disc and do an “erase & install”
3. You use migration assistant to bring your apps and data over from the backup.
That should be it, I’m in the process of doing my back up so will update this post with any findings!
UPDATE: 8 September
Well it took almost three days trying to Leopard back. First you can’t use migration assistant to migrate your apps and files from Snow Leopard to Leopard. It will as in my case though try, and with over 250GB of data to transfer I tried three times, and each time it failed right near the end. The thing to look for is when you first start up migration assistant, if the user details you select say “0kb” then it won’t work, as soon as I tried migration assistant from my previous Leopard backup the user I selected stated the true amount of data, then I clicked transfer and one hour and forty five minutes later it was back!
I have my iTunes folder on another drive and when I purchased some new music I got an error where it wouldn’t download (err = 500) or simliar. I found the fix for this here http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1843056
I’d like to report that CS3 and all my apps are once again working!! I’ll think I’ll wait now until everything is tested and working on Snow leopard before I upgrade.
Still have the laptop to fix, which isn’t going to be much fun as I don’t have a very recent backup of that…
September 18th, 2009 at 7:37 am
I hear your troubles, my Snow Leopard doesnt crash when I’m using any particular application, it just freezes up and locks while sitting with the screen saver running, never had it crash while I was “doing” anything, but every night a hour or so into my non use and screen saver, it locks up (with the screen in energy saver blank and I have to power reset it. Just not worth it, they really should have marketed it so people as a “if you run exchange for email” update. I don’t really see anything to help my day to day, its worse now.
Now back to why I was posting, I think I know of a easier way to downgrade. You need to have a time machine setup (might I add, I would put my original time machine disk away, and pull out my spare disk and make it a time machine (just in case)). Anyways, open time machine and drag and drop your root /System folder into time machine, it will ask you if you want to exclude ALL system files, where you choose yes. Now you have a time machine of all your user stuff, apps, settings, etc, without the OS part.
Then you re-innstall leopard and use the setup assistant and point to it the new time machine backup. (don’t use regular time machine, you need to use setup assistant and migrate settings from time machine)
Just think this is smoother.