[macvoiceover] Warning about buying a new computer if you want to use an older OS
- From: Cheryl Homiak <cahomiak@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: macvoiceover@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2012 09:43:14 -0500
I hope this won't be considered off-topic, but I thought I should warn people.
If you buy a new MacBook Pro (and this probably applies to other new models
too), and you have an external drive that was a backup from your old computer,
it's very likely that the external drive won't boot on the new computer even
though it shows up in Startup Disks in System Preferences, though of course the
external drive will boot up fine if you then use it to backup from your new
computer; it's the system that was done on the other computer that is the
problem and not the external drive itself. Also, if you buy a new MacBook Pro,
which has Lion, it appears that it won't boot the Snow Leopard install dvd and
also won't boot an external drive with Snow Leopard any lower than 10.6.8. I
don't know what will happen when Mountain Lion comes out; it's possible that
new computers that come out after Mountain Lion will only support Mountain Lion
and the highest upgrade of Lion but that remains to be seen. I found this out
when I did a backup of my Snow Leopard installation that is on my supposedly
dying Mac Mini and tried to boot it on my new MacBook Pro after also finding
out that my Lion backup from my mini wouldn't boot up on my MacBook Pro either.
I finally called Apple Care and the above is what they told me. You can,
however, boot an external drive that was done on your new computer on the old
one, assuming your old one meets the requirements for that version of the Mac
OS. I thought I should tell people this because when you boot of course
voiceover won't come up and you may have no idea why a system that boots fine
on one computer won't boot on the other. Since I have a reason to need Snow
Leopard at 10.6.7, this leaves me with a rather strange situation. I bought the
MacBook Pro because I was told the logic board is probably failing and I
decided to buy a new computer rather than fixing the old mini. But now I'm in
the situation of needing to consider getting the mini fixed so I can keep
running Snow Leopard, even though I have a new MacBook Pro which I do like very
much. I thought other people might appreciate being warned before the purchase
of a brand new Mac; I honestly don't know for sure what I would have done had I
known. If you want to run anything below the current OS, or if you have backup
drives you want to use with the new computer but didn't want to do a reinstall,
it's a good idea to check out the parameters carefully before you buy a new Mac.
--
Cheryl
May the words of my mouth
and the meditation of my heart
be acceptable to You, Lord,
my rock and my Redeemer.
(Psalm 19:14 HCSB)
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