How to more easily restart from snow leopard to El Capitan.

[ktaaa]

I am sure that there are many many people out there who still use Snow Leopard because they have programs that cannot be used otherwise.

I have recently partitioned a drive, Put snow leopard in half of it and put El Capitan in the other half. I can easily, by going to system preferences and then startup disk and then choose snow leopard while I am in El Capitan.

While in Snow Leopard I go to system preferences and then startup disk and find that the only way to get to El Capitan is to choose network. This usually does work but is very slow and discouraging.

Has anyone come up with an app to fix this? Or has Apple even considered fixing this?

 

[MacUser2525]

SL is not even in Apples consideration for anything at this point in time it is abandonware. Is there some reason your Option key held down while booting does not show you the normal choice of OS to boot?

 

[ktaaa]

When I hold down the option key while booting, I am shown all available drives as it should.
Unfortunately, when I click on El C or any other drive my computer locks up.
[doublepost=1454096163][/doublepost]When I hold down the option key while booting, I am shown all available drives as it should.
Unfortunately, when I click on El C or any other drive my computer locks up.

 

[MacUser2525]

Well no clue on that one then although I would think you have bigger problems than slow EC boot with that machine. Time to check it with a diagnostic disk/usb stick if you can get your hands on one.

 

[ktaaa]

I was afraid of that. Disk Warrior used to work, but not with El C. I have no idea of where to get a diagnostic disk or stick.
Thanks for the reply
[doublepost=1454097689][/doublepost]I was afraid of that. Disk Warrior used to work, but not with El C. I have no idea of where to get a diagnostic disk or stick.
Thanks for the reply

 

[DeltaMac]

You can boot to your recovery system - Restart holding Command-R.
Run Disk Utility from there, then choose each partition in the list, and run First Aid on each partition.
That will quickly tell you something about possible hard drive problems, and may tell you that you need to try a more capable disk repair utility. Your clue would be if you get a message that you need to "back up the partition, erase the drive, then restore your software", or something very similar to that.
Come back with what you find out.

 

[Partron22]

I used to use this AppleScript I wrote (saved as an App) to toggle between two versions of the OS:

-- Startup Disk Toggler
-- BP Mar 2011
-- Switches startup between two drives, and restarts

-- see http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20070126131322301
--------------------
set d1 to "Titan"
set d2 to "Callisto"
-------------------

tell application "System Events"
set curdsk to name of startup disk
end tell
if curdsk is equal to d1 then
set ndnm to d2
set newdskpth to quoted form of ("/Volumes/" & d2)
else
set ndnm to d1
set newdskpth to quoted form of ("/Volumes/" & d1)
end if

-- Now have newdisk name (ndm) and newdiskpath for shell scripts


-- based on this line from link:
-- do shell script "bless -mount \"/Volumes/Name of the drive\" -setBoot"

--do shell script "bless -mount " & newdskpth & " -setBoot" with administrator privileges
--tell application "System Events" to restart

-- Sadly, bless -mount' won't deal with unmounted disks, and I'm too stupid to figure out 'bless -device' today
-- So let's ensure the disk is mounted before I try to bless it:

set tx to do shell script "diskutil info " & quoted form of ndnm
set ofs to offset of "Mounted:" in tx
set tx to characters (ofs + 8) thru -1 of tx as string


set yofs to offset of "Y" in tx
set nofs to offset of "N" in tx

if (yofs is equal to 0) or (nofs is less than yofs) then -- it's not mounted
do shell script "diskutil mount " & quoted form of ndnm
end if

-- OK, we're mounted. Now get on with the reboot:
do shell script "bless -mount " & newdskpth & " -setBoot" with administrator privileges

tell application "System Events" to restart

I just kept the App on each System's desktop for double-clicking.
It used to work pretty well, but I've not tried it with El Capitan as one of the OS's. It'll likely ask for a password when going from el cap down.

 

[chrfr]

I was afraid of that. Disk Warrior used to work, but not with El C. I have no idea of where to get a diagnostic disk or stick.

Diskwarrior works as well with El Capitan as with any other version of OS X. If your copy isn't working, it's probably time for an upgrade.

 

[CoastalOR]

I agree with chrfr. I have El Capitan 10.11.3 and Disk Warrior 5 works fine. If you do not have Disk Warrior 5 then you need an upgrade for it to work properly with El Capitan.

Here is information about upgrading:
http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/upgrade.html

 

[ktaaa]

I did the command R, ran disk utility and now things are running fine.
My fingers are crossed. Thanks for the input.
[doublepost=1454180510][/doublepost]I did the command R, ran disk utility and now things are running fine.
My fingers are crossed. Thanks for the input.