Imac Question maybe someone could give me a answer.

[mrdunderhead]

Greetings My name is John.

I currently own 2 Ebay iMacs.

Let me explain. they where both a part of a youtube challenge I am doing and I get a surprise on one of them I purchased.

1. iMac mid 2011 21.5 inch I5 2.5 ghz
4 gig's of ram
2TB Western digital blue hard drive.
running Mac OS X high Sierra
Total cost was 40.00 (Was labeled as not working Just found out they didn't have the lcd connector connected to the main board lol.)

2. iMac 2009 Core 2 duo 2.25 ghz 24 inch
1TB Western digital hard drive
4 gig's of ram
Running Mac OS X 10.7
Total cost 30.00

so my question was this if I downgrade the core 2 duo to a older operating system the original for this machine is 10.5 leopard so that I can run some classic powerpc games on it using rosetta. due to the fact I didn't like rosetta on 10.6 snow leopard.

can I just transfer my files that I need onto the core 2 duo from the high Sierra machine using a network connection or would I be better on target disk mode. the reason I am asking is because the Superdrive on the 2009 is D.O.A so I was going to place a internal hard drive in the super drive slot and go to a external drive for dvd rom access. to install games and other old apps I purchase on amazon and ebay.

would this work ok...

 

[nambuccaheadsau]

Snow Leopard OS X.6 was built with Rosetta to run these PowerPC applications and games. If you don't want to use Snow Leopard you are out of luck. A great many of us think SL is far better than Lion.

Should you ever think either machine is slow, John, consider installing an SSD and maybe memory to 8GB. Used units can be found on eBay and such but make sure you get only Mac compatible memory, Crucial and OWC best. OWC (macsales) often have used memory for sale.

 

[AnonMac50]

This computer officially supports both Leopard and Snow Leopard, both with Rosetta support (Snow Leopard requiring an extra optional install).

In terms of transferring files, both Target Disk Mode and network transfers work perfectly fine. If you use an Ethernet connection, you might even get higher speeds (I think both machines have Gigabit Ethernet, which should theoretically be slightly faster than the FireWire 800 on both these computers). I often use Wi-Fi to transfer files though.

Note, if you're planning to do the installation you would need FireWire and target disk mode, but you can only install Snow Leopard directly. Being that the computer you is a 2011 iMac, normal Snow Leopard installers won't work, and you need the special one (Leopard won't install), but what you could do is make an image of the Leopard install disc and restore it on to a drive or partition, then install it directly from there. You can remove the installer partition later if you like, or keep it, like a recovery partition. One more option is to use NetBoot from your High Sierra machine, but that would require you to have Leopard already set up somewhere to create the image.

One more option is to clone the Leopard installer to an external drive and install it from there, or use an external DVD drive.

Finally, remember that with file transfers, you won't be able to transfer a whole system account (for example using migration assistant), but you can transfer normal files.

PS. Out of curiosity, is there a difference between Rosetta on Snow Leopard and Leopard? I didn't feel any difference when I used them, but I haven't used them in a while; I just use my PPC Macs for that, so my memory might be hazy.

Good luck! And let us know how it goes!

 

[mrdunderhead]

thank you the reason for using Mac OS X leopard was several older games that I love to play like the first 2 Harry Potter games run in windowed mode on the computer in Mac OS X snow leopard where in leopard they run in complete full screen mode making the experience more user friendly.