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Lion - no turning back!
#16813 08/04/11 04:20 PM
Joined: Aug 2009
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Customer shows up in a panic, quicken won't run under Lion, which he just upgraded to. (it was an older version that used rosetta) Intuit of course told him to buy an upgrade. He asked us to downgrade back to snow, which I was expecting would go fairly smoothly. I'd done snow to leopard, leopard to tiger, tiger to panther, and even panther to jaguar many times. Just boot the install disc, it will refuse to select, go to options, change to archive and install, and away you go.

Some of you will notice the problem already. The snow installer has no "options" button, and no way to explicitly ask for an archive & install. But the outcome is a little more unexpected. The installer boots, and when you try to select the volume, it says you cannot start from OS X from that volume. It's like what happens when you try to install onto a APS partitioned volume. It's saying you need to reformat. (somewhat OT but related, intels can start fine off APS formatted volumes, all my service drives are formatted that way because PPC cannot start off GPT, the only snag is 1. the OS installers lie and say you can't use it, and 2. the firmware updaters refuse to run)

So I figure there has to be a way around this. I called applecare, and he insisted it's impossible to go back to snow from lion. The rep I talked with wasn't very educated though, he also insisted this never works, not even for say, 10.6 to 10.5, so I had to school him a bit. After talking awhile we settled on a few options:

1) get your time machine backup current, erase and install 10.6, and restore from backup (I am concerned that 10.6 may not want to restore from a 10.7 time machine backup - anyone tried it yet? or are you hosed it time machine got a backup ran after you upgraded?)

2) perform some other form of backup. erase and install 10.6. Manually restore applications and user accounts (I'm favoring this option)

3) purchase an external hard drive and install 10.6 on that and use it when needed (was recommended to above customer)

So... if you go to Lion, you'd better be sure you're going to like it, or make darn sure you have your ducks in a row for reverting, and prepare for the headache.



I work for the Department of Redundancy Department
Re: Lion - no turning back!
Virtual1 #16814 08/04/11 04:48 PM
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Im going to have to upgrade to Lion, much as I don't especially want to, simply because I do software development and I need to be able to test on Lion.

My strategy: I've ordered a new 500 GB hard drive, which I will be partitioning and setting up for Lion and Snow Leopard. I anticipate booting into Snow Leopard most of the time, and booting into Lion only for testing and development.


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Re: Lion - no turning back!
Virtual1 #16818 08/04/11 05:10 PM
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Quote:
quicken won't run under Lion

For your customers information, Intuit has indicated that they will not be porting Quicken to OS X 10.7 or the Intel processor on the Mac. They are "evaluating" Quicken Essentials on Lion (if you are not tracking investments), offering the online Mint.com (if you are uninterested in your transaction history), or installing Windows and using Quicken for Windows (which has always had more features than Quicken for Mac, but you will lose the transaction history in converting to the Windows version).

iBank or Moneydance will do a competent job of importing Quicken QIF files and your customer would not lose the transaction history. Alternatively if your customer insists on using Quicken he/she could install Parallels Desktop, Windows XP or Windows 7 and run Quicken for Windows virtually seamlessly on the Lion desktop.


If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein
Re: Lion - no turning back!
joemikeb #16822 08/04/11 06:37 PM
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Originally Posted By: joemikeb
They are "evaluating" Quicken Essentials on Lion (if you are not tracking investments), offering the online Mint.com (if you are uninterested in your transaction history), or installing Windows and using Quicken for Windows (which has always had more features than Quicken for Mac, but you will lose the transaction history in converting to the Windows version).


I think what they are really "evaluating" is how few of their customers (redheaded stepchild variety) they have left after all the abuse to make another release worth the effort.

Originally Posted By: joemikeb


Yes, that same customer just came back with their imac to check in. He wasn't able to get iBank to import properly (hard to say whose fault that was tho) so we're going with option #3.


I work for the Department of Redundancy Department
Re: Lion - no turning back!
Virtual1 #16829 08/04/11 08:07 PM
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Originally Posted By: Virtual1
The snow installer has no "options" button, and no way to explicitly ask for an archive & install. But the outcome is a little more unexpected. The installer boots, and when you try to select the volume, it says you cannot start from OS X from that volume. It's like what happens when you try to install onto a APS partitioned volume. It's saying you need to reformat. (somewhat OT but related, intels can start fine off APS formatted volumes, all my service drives are formatted that way because PPC cannot start off GPT, the only snag is 1. the OS installers lie and say you can't use it, and 2. the firmware updaters refuse to run)

Since a PPC can't boot into Snow Leopard anyway, there's no reason to continue hanging onto APM, and lots of reasons to move on to the superior GPT on your new iMacs. (For one thing, APM cannot handle a drive (not a partition) larger than 2TB without changing sector size to something larger than 512 bytes. Changing the sector size confuses some third-party disk utilities, so Apple provides no way to do it.)

Besides, the ability to boot an Intel machine from APM is a feature supported by the firmware in the machine. New machines may well drop that support. Machines that ship with Lion, in particular, have support for the Recover HD partition and for Internet Recovery (both accessed from the new Command-R startup key combination). It should not be unexpected that new firmware will someday drop the ability to boot from APM. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

If the new machine came with Snow Leopard or earlier, it's easy to go back. Just restore from backup. (You do have backups, right? That's the only way you could have put Snow Leopard on an APM disk in the first place. As you've (re)discovered, the installer cannot be coaxed into doing it, and the old trick of installing on a PPC machine won't work either.)

A new machine that came with Lion installed can't run Snow Leopard anyway.

Originally Posted By: Virtual1
1) get your time machine backup current, erase and install 10.6, and restore from backup (I am concerned that 10.6 may not want to restore from a 10.7 time machine backup - anyone tried it yet? or are you hosed it time machine got a backup ran after you upgraded?)

This was actually one of the first things I tested with Lion. (Time Machine fascinates me.) I had an extra 1TB drive laying around, so while still under 10.6.8 I formatted it into three partitions:
  • I cloned my TM backup to one partition, and used SuperDuper to clone InstallESD.dmg on top of that (using SD, because it will leave TM unharmed if it finds it on the destination volume of a clone) so that that TM partition was now also a Lion Install Disk.
  • Onto the second partition I cloned my Snow Leopard boot volume, using SuperDuper.
  • The third partition I left empty.
Then I installed Lion on my main system, and let TM take a few more snapshots of that to the TM clone on the first partition.

Then I tested the Lion Install Disk I had made of the TM partition, trying every combination I could think of. It successfully:
  • Upgraded the SL clone on partition 2 to Lion
  • Installed Lion on the blank partition 3
  • Restored partition 2 back to SL from the TM backup on partition 1.
  • Restored partition 2 back to Lion, again using the TM backup on partition 1.
  • Erased each of partitions 2 and 3 using Disk Utility, both the DU on the Lion Install Disk and the normal one on my main Lion partition.
  • ...and many other tests, including repeating some of those tests using the Restore HD partition and the Lion Install Disc I had burned onto a DVD.
The only hiccup I ran into was that every time TM restores a volume, it wants to rename that volume the same as the volume it backed up. That always left me with two volumes with the same name. The OS isn't confused, because all disks were GPT so volume names are unimportant, but I was afraid I would be, so I had to manually change the name back after each TM restore.

Don't forget that the TM backup itself is OS-version agnostic. All the smarts in TM go into creating the backup, but the backup itself is dead-simple boring. If a TM backup contains snapshots from both Snow Leopard and Lion, you can use TM in restore-whole-volume mode to go back to one of the SL snapshots, and then use it in normal mode to restore the documents you changed while you were running Lion. Restoring from an old snapshot does not preclude doing additional restores from newer snapshots.

Also, you said "erase and install 10.6, and restore from backup". You don't need to install 10.6 first, nor even erase the disk. Just restore the whole disk, while booted from any install disk (including Lion's Recovery HD), and you'll get whatever OS was backed up to that snapshot. If you use any of the Lion restore mechanisms, and restore to non-Lion, the Recovery HD partition that was carved out of that volume gets re-absorbed. (Actually, Lion does this any time it erases a volume followed by a Recovery HD volume. If you then restore or install Lion onto that partition, the Recover HD partition gets carved out anew.)

Originally Posted By: Virtual1
2) perform some other form of backup. erase and install 10.6. Manually restore applications and user accounts (I'm favoring this option)

That'll work, but TM restores are smooth and fast. Select a SL snapshot to restore from, start it going, and go grab some coffee. When it's done, so are you.

Originally Posted By: Virtual1
3) purchase an external hard drive and install 10.6 on that and use it when needed (was recommended to above customer)
That also will work. I'm doing the moral equivalent: I kept my SL machine around (I only bought a new iMac because the old one won't support Lion) and keep using Quicken on that.

Bear in mind that there is always a cost to booting back and forth between versions of the OS. They often don't trust each other, and will rebuild files that they don't think the other one kept up to date. OS X would always force MacOS 9 to rebuild its desktop database, because OS X couldn't be bothered to maintain it; Tiger would re-index its Spotlight database if it saw that an earlier version of the OS had touched the volume. (Snow) Leopard throws away its FSEvent log if it sees that an earlier version used the volume, forcing your first TM backup after coming back to require a time-consuming deep scan.

Lion is no different. Lion and Snow Leopard apparently don't trust each other's Spotlight databases, because I saw Spotlight re-indexing all volumes every time I switched in either direction. (This observation was a side-effect of the TM+Lion Install Disk testing I mentioned earlier.) Fortunately, re-indexing is a lot faster than it used to be.

Originally Posted By: Virtual1
So... if you go to Lion, you'd better be sure you're going to like it, or make darn sure you have your ducks in a row for reverting, and prepare for the headache.

I had all my ducks in a row, did lots of preparation and testing, and in the end discovered that I really like Lion. It's a big change from Snow Leopard, and it took about a week of use before it became comfortable, but I'm now satisfied that the change was very much for the better.

The trick, as always, is: don't fight the new system. Don't rush to reconfigure Lion to behave just like SL, or L, or Tiger, or MacOS 9, or whatever you were last comfortable with. Leave the default scrolling set the Lion way. Learn to like Xcode 4.1. Turn on all the multi-touch gestures. Use them.

Everything feels strange at first, but it doesn't take long to get used to it. There's a brief disorientation when you go back to a SL machine, but it passes quickly. It's just like the disorientation when moving between SL and Tiger and their different Dock behaviors, or the disorientation going back and forth between an automatic transmission and a stick shift. Each time you do it, the transition becomes easier, and eventually you don't even notice that your left foot seems to just know whether it needs to work a clutch or not, without you having to think about it.

Re: Lion - no turning back!
Virtual1 #16844 08/05/11 01:03 PM
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Originally Posted By: Virtual1
Yes, that same customer just came back with their imac to check in. He wasn't able to get iBank to import properly (hard to say whose fault that was tho) so we're going with option #3.

Your customer will very likely be satisfied with option 3. In "coherence" mode the integration with the OS X desktop is so complete you sometimes cannot tell if an app is running in OS X or Windows. Lots of RAM helps however.


If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein
Re: Lion - no turning back!
joemikeb #16847 08/05/11 03:14 PM
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Originally Posted By: joemikeb
Originally Posted By: Virtual1
Yes, that same customer just came back with their imac to check in. He wasn't able to get iBank to import properly (hard to say whose fault that was tho) so we're going with option #3.

Your customer will very likely be satisfied with option 3. In "coherence" mode the integration with the OS X desktop is so complete you sometimes cannot tell if an app is running in OS X or Windows. Lots of RAM helps however.


Actually we hit yet more snags. It won't let you install lion on a hard drive that currently houses a time machine backup. So I booted off a service drive and partitioned the internal drive into two pieces, one to install snow onto. I then realized the computer was too new to run the 10.6.3 so I had to find a way to run the installer without booting it, which I did. (dig into /System/Installation/ and run the os mpkg) But unfortunately my first run was the baseos pkg, which WILL overwrite lion with snow leopard (huuuh?) and I accidentally did so.

So now getting snow on the other partition and running the combo updater (before setup) so it was bootable, I just told it to migrate from another volume and selected the (formerly) lion updated partition. This worked and he's back on snow leopard. He left the wrong pw and OS updates like this disable auto login so I'm waiting to hear back from him for testing to verify everything 's cool but I expect most things to be good. There may be an app or two I have to backdate, OS installs like this can leave later versions of apps like Mail that sometimes don't run on the older os.

Weird results came from installing the os pkg over lion. In addition to the surprise of it running in the first place, I was unable to run the full installer on the lion partition afterward, this time it was saying it "couldn't UPgrade it". But I suppose I've confused it a bit. I'm running the snow combo updater on it now and going to test it to see what sort of condition it's in. There won't be any reason to keep it, assuming the snow installation went fine, I'll probably delete the partition in a little bit, just curious at this point to see what it thinks of my improvising.



I work for the Department of Redundancy Department
Re: Lion - no turning back!
ganbustein #16848 08/05/11 03:25 PM
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Originally Posted By: ganbustein
Since a PPC can't boot into Snow Leopard anyway, there's no reason to continue hanging onto APM, and lots of reasons to move on to the superior GPT on your new iMacs. (For one thing, APM cannot handle a drive (not a partition) larger than 2TB without changing sector size to something larger than 512 bytes. Changing the sector size confuses some third-party disk utilities, so Apple provides no way to do it.)

Besides, the ability to boot an Intel machine from APM is a feature supported by the firmware in the machine. New machines may well drop that support. Machines that ship with Lion, in particular, have support for the Recover HD partition and for Internet Recovery (both accessed from the new Command-R startup key combination). It should not be unexpected that new firmware will someday drop the ability to boot from APM. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

If the new machine came with Snow Leopard or earlier, it's easy to go back. Just restore from backup. (You do have backups, right? That's the only way you could have put Snow Leopard on an APM disk in the first place. As you've (re)discovered, the installer cannot be coaxed into doing it, and the old trick of installing on a PPC machine won't work either.)


I only just recently removed os 9 from the service drive. It's a good deal more flexible than you might imagine. It's a single drive that contains bootable install media for panther, tiger, tiger intel, leopard, snow leopard, and lion. It also contains an installed leopard, snow, and lion. APS formatting is required to boot on the PPC machines I work on, and despite what Apple says, it works on intel too.

Yes I have backups, but I'm a service provider, and most people don't.

Originally Posted By: ganbustein
A new machine that came with Lion installed can't run Snow Leopard anyway.


That time will come, very soon I'm sure, but not yet. Probably in a week or two. The big trick right now is running the 10.6.3 on a machine that won't boot it. See previous post.


Originally Posted By: ganbustein
Originally Posted By: Virtual1
2) perform some other form of backup. erase and install 10.6. Manually restore applications and user accounts (I'm favoring this option)

That'll work, but TM restores are smooth and fast. Select a SL snapshot to restore from, start it going, and go grab some coffee. When it's done, so are you.



Less than half our customers have time machine backups. I need options for those that need to go back to snow that lack backups.




I work for the Department of Redundancy Department

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