Can you downgrade back to Lion?

[i0Nic]

If you install ML, can you then downgrade back to lion if you want?

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Yes, via a clean install. Therefore make sure to backup your data before doing that.

Or you could clone Lion onto an external HDD, install ML and then, when you want to go back, boot from the clone, format the internal HDD and clone Lion back.

 

[Tmelon]

You could but I don't see why you would. Even from Dev preview 1 Mountain Lion is already much stronger than Lion.

 

[Killerbob]

It may be stronger, but a lot of 3rd party programs and utilities do not work. And, you need to work at getting a lot of them working. Take a look at you widgets, check out the discussion on Fusion and Parallels.

DP1 ML is exactly as named, a developers preview. For the majority of users, it's not relevant.

Bo

PS - I run it in a VM via Parallels, and agree it is interesting.

 

[Violin]

The problem is when I am a developer who programming apps for Mac (and iOS) and my dev tools are broken in ML!
Need to install Lion again too, hoped to stay at ML but... OH WELL...

 

[Takuro]

I'd suggest installing ML on a spare partition. If you're using an normal partitioning scheme on your hard disk, you can dynamically shrink the size of your main boot partition and then create a new partition from the freed space. Creating a partition of 20-50 GB should be enough to play around with ML without major constraints, and you can keep all large documents on the Lion partition.

 

[jennyp]

Or you could clone Lion onto an external HDD, install ML and then, when you want to go back, boot from the clone, format the internal HDD and clone Lion back.

Has anyone actually done this yet successfully?

 

[^^BIGMac]

Hey, maybe they put Rosetta back in Mountain Lion.

 

[maflynn]

The easiest and safest way is to back up your 10.7 environment, so you can restore it when you need to go back to 10.7

You may need to initially do a fresh install of 10.7 just to fix the recovery partition and then do a restore but its the easiest way to get your apps/data back

 

[Killerbob]

Hi maflynn,

I thought so as well, but when I got to restoring from TC, it simply didn't work. I booted of a USB key with Lion, and tried restoring from TC. It went through the motions, but wouldn't boot correctly. It just sat there with the spinning circle...

I eventually reinstalled Lion on top of what had been restored from TC, and then ran all the updates again (10.7 -> 10.7.3).

I don't know why the TC restoration didn't work, but it looked as if it didn't set the HD to be bootable, or something was missing. I tried to fix/repair via Disk Utility, but alas.

It works now, but I have learned not to trust TC.

Bo

 

[pdjudd]

It works now, but I have learned not to trust TC.

One of the best adages about backup that I have heard is that it if doesn’t exist in three places (with different methods) than it might as well not exist at all. You cannot depend on only one backup type.

 

[maflynn]

I eventually reinstalled Lion on top of what had been restored from TC, and then ran all the updates again (10.7 -> 10.7.3).

That's what I'm saying, re-install 10.7 and then restore your data and apps.

For me I used Carbon Copy Cloner because its easier to restore your data once you fix the recovery partition. That is once I have a blank 10.7 system, I just restore my cloned image and its like I never even upgraded

Time Machine adds a complexity that I try to avoid in these situations (though I do use TM as well) For now I have that disabled because I don't want to start backing up 10.8 and losing some of my 10.7 backups

 

[cube]

You can downgrade to Lion from Snow Leopard without reinstalling.

 

[HabSonic]

You can downgrade to Lion from Snow Leopard without reinstalling.

I see what you did there.