Going from Yosemite to Snow Leopard

[miga_7]

Hi,

I know similar questions have been asked to death, but I have read all the instructions on the web and still having problem with this.

First of all, my laptop is a macbook pro 15" late 2008/early 2009. And it still has the original HDD drive it came with.

Secondly, due to the fact that I dropped my laptop a couple of years' back, the DVD player doesn't work, so I've made a usb installer for Snow Leopard.

So to go back to Snow Leopard I followed the instruction of first erasing/partitioning my disk by going to Recovery. First problem occurred because I couldn't partition or erase the main hard drive (not the macintosh HD, but the parent folder which is the Toshiba or something, I can't remember now). I got the "could not unmount disk" error. So I erased the macintosh HD instead. That went smoothly. Then restarted with the option key again and selected the Snow Leopard installer. Everything goes well until when I have to choose the volume in which I have to install, the only available option being the macintosh HD, but I get an error that macintosh HD can't be used to startup from. So I went back to Recovery (and under the Recovery it says 10.10 recovery, so I guess Yosemite isn't completely gone) I have an option for reinstalling OS X, which of course is Yosemite, which seems to be working fine for now (although it's taking 5 hrs). So I'm going back to Yosemite again.

So I'm wondering what the problem is? Is my hard drive damaged (perhaps from when I dropped it a few years ago)? Or there is some other way that I can try this? I really can't go back to Yosemite, nothing works there, and this is my work computer!

Thank you for the help, and for reading this long message to the end!

 

[leinad]

Am thinking you might have to delete all partitions on the hard drive, reboot it, and then re-attempt the Snow Leopard install from scratch.

Perhaps physically remove the drive and use an external enclosure and a different OS to do it. Or, use a Yosemite boot drive to do the partition removal.

/Dan

 

[asriznet]

Hi,

I know similar questions have been asked to death, but I have read all the instructions on the web and still having problem with this.

First of all, my laptop is a macbook pro 15" late 2008/early 2009. And it still has the original HDD drive it came with.

Secondly, due to the fact that I dropped my laptop a couple of years' back, the DVD player doesn't work, so I've made a usb installer for Snow Leopard.

So to go back to Snow Leopard I followed the instruction of first erasing/partitioning my disk by going to Recovery. First problem occurred because I couldn't partition or erase the main hard drive (not the macintosh HD, but the parent folder which is the Toshiba or something, I can't remember now). I got the "could not unmount disk" error. So I erased the macintosh HD instead. That went smoothly. Then restarted with the option key again and selected the Snow Leopard installer. Everything goes well until when I have to choose the volume in which I have to install, the only available option being the macintosh HD, but I get an error that macintosh HD can't be used to startup from. So I went back to Recovery (and under the Recovery it says 10.10 recovery, so I guess Yosemite isn't completely gone) I have an option for reinstalling OS X, which of course is Yosemite, which seems to be working fine for now (although it's taking 5 hrs). So I'm going back to Yosemite again.

So I'm wondering what the problem is? Is my hard drive damaged (perhaps from when I dropped it a few years ago)? Or there is some other way that I can try this? I really can't go back to Yosemite, nothing works there, and this is my work computer!

Thank you for the help, and for reading this long message to the end!

The reason you cannot repartition the physical main drive because you're booted to recovery partition which is part of that main drive.

You should repartition the physical main drive while booted to OS X Snow Leopard USB installer.

I think your concern is that you could not find disk utility in the USB installer?

Disk utility is present however not on the main screen like how it is for the recovery partition.
After choosing the language option in OS X Snow Leopard USB installer, click on Utilities on menu bar on top, you'll find disk utility there.

Once in Disk Utility:
Select the main drive on the left(upper one)
Click on the partition tab on the right
Click the drop down menu and change from current to 1 partition
Rename the partition to "Macintosh HD"
Max out the size
Make sure format is "Mac OS Extended Journaled"
Click on options and make sure GUID Partition Table is selected.
Click OK then Apply to repartition the main drive.

If you have done it properly, you should only see OS X Snow Leopard installer in the Startup Manager(option boot)

You can then perform the installation of OS X Snow Leopard on Macintosh HD