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.
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.
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.
