Downgrading back to Snow Leopard...

Well here I am. About 18 months after purchasing my mid-2011 Mini and I'm begging Apple for a way to "downgrade" to Snow Leopard.

Why do you ask? Well, I had no intentions of doing this when I originally got the computer. The occasional crash, restart, bug report was fine at first. It only happened once every other month or so.

Then Mountain Lion came out so I figured I'd be a good Apple-ite and throw down the $20 for it. Well, that never happened. After about two dozen attempts of installing Mountain Lion (with the apparent "fix" done for each attempt), I never could get past the following message:

"This copy of the Install OS X Mountain Lion application can't be verified. It may have been corrupted or tampered with during downloading. Delete this copy of the application, and go to the Purchases page of the Mac App Store to download a new copy"

Okay so no Mountain Lion for me. Fast forward to the past couple of months. My computer now crashes, restarts, and bug reports at least twice a day. And sometimes after the restart my mouse will just start going crazy and random crap starts getting clicked, opened, shut down, etc. So I have to keep restarting until everything finally goes back to normal; until the next crash, reboot, bug report inevitably occurs.

I have been in a constant email chain with Apple for a while now (since the Mountain Lion install fiasco), and I have officially requested to go back to Snow Leopard. I still have a white MacBook from 2008 with Snow Leopard that has been the most flawless machine I have ever owned. Oh how I long for my Mini to perform with such stability.

I'll keep y'all updated on how this goes.

FreakinEurekan said:

Since SL is not supported on that hardware I don't see you getting anywhere with that request. But obviously the machine shouldn't be locking up, etc. as you're experiencing. Lion isn't the issue, or it would be happening to everyone.

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I kinda figured as much. However, Apple gave me the "all transactions are final" line for about 2 months after I bought Mountain Lion and they eventually backed off on that. This was after I did everything they asked, including two trips to Apple stores, that resulted in no successful installation of Mountain Lion.

I'm hoping they will find a way to get Snow Leopard on my Mini for the same reasons.

FreakinEurekan said:

Have you reinstalled Lion?

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Yes, multiple times. Through time machine and clean install.

FreakinEurekan said:

Have you done extended AHT?

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About 337 times.

minifridge1138 said:

If the Apple Store was unable to install Mountain Lion, then you have a defective machine.

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I agree. But Apple hasn't offered to give me another one (yet).

I'll suggest that idea next if the Snow Leopard idea fails (which I'm fully expecting it to).

geeji said:

AFAIK, although the Mac Mini 2011 is officially supported by Lion and beyond, you can hack it to boot with Snow Leopard.
See the tuto there.
But beware that you do not confuse a hardware problem with your Mac Mini with a supposed OS X problem...

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I've gone through the hardware check route several times. Disk checks. Memory checks. AHT's, etc.

All of the tests complete successfully.

Also, Apple has, on file, over two dozen bug reports from my machine. So far, none of the diagnoses have fixed the issue.

Okay major update.

I appreciate all the suggestions for diagnosis. Most of them, at some point in the last 6 months, were attempted and failed.

So anyways; after dozens of emails back and forth with Apple and 4 trips to the Apple store, I now have a brand new 2012 Mini coming my way; courtesy of Apple.

As I had imagined, the idea to downgrade back to Snow Leopard did not go over well with the Apple support team. They actually told me I could purchase Snow Leopard, however; the install would probably not go well and they did not recommend going that route.

As frustrating as the process became, the back and forth emails provided plenty of opportunities for kernel panics which I could almost immediately submit to the Apple support tech I was talking with. It was during this process the tech told me to just take the Mini to the Apple store and leave it there. So I did. For 4 days.

Well today I received an email from the Apple store letting me know that they could not fix the problem. They are certain it's a hardware issue; just not sure which one. Basically, he said he had the machine stripped down to nothing but the OS on tested RAM and hard disk and still got crashes.

They are sending me a replacement 2012 Mini with Mountain Lion and I should receive it Tuesday. Hopefully, this will be my happy ending.