Dual Booting with an older OS X version

[mklnk]

I have a 2012 Mac Mini with OS X 10.8.5

I have recently purchased a piece of audio recording hardware that is not compatible with 10.8.5. How can I go about installing an older version of 10.8, or 10.7 on a separate hard drive partition?

 

[benwiggy]

You can install 10.7 or earlier version of 10.8 on any partition you like. The difficulty is in obtaining an earlier version, if you haven't saved one yourself.

I find it hard to believe that some software is not compatible with 10.8.5, but compatible with earlier version of 10.8.x.
Point updates are bug fixes, not changes to APIs and architectures.
If you have recently purchased some software that doesn't work with 10.8, I would ask for your money back.

 

[mklnk]

You can install 10.7 or earlier version of 10.8 on any partition you like. The difficulty is in obtaining an earlier version, if you haven't saved one yourself.

I find it hard to believe that some software is not compatible with 10.8.5, but compatible with earlier version of 10.8.x.
Point updates are bug fixes, not changes to APIs and architectures.
If you have recently purchased some software that doesn't work with 10.8, I would ask for your money back.

The drivers for M-Audio's Profire 2626 do not support 10.8.5, and they were many months late in supporting 10.8.4

I may be able to get the .dmg i need from the tech department at my job, or I will try Ubuntu Studio, which has a working 3rd party driver.

 

[benwiggy]

The drivers for M-Audio's Profire 2626 do not support 10.8.5, and they were many months late in supporting 10.8.4

Weird. Apple doesn't mention audio in the list of fixes, though those lists are far from exhaustive.

I gave up on M-Audio because it took them 6 months to bring out drivers for Snow Leopard. I now use Edirol hardware which is CoreAudio/CoreMIDI compliant, so it doesn't need any drivers.

 

[mklnk]

Just to update, my Profire 2626 arrived and I tested it briefly on OS X 10.8.4 with Garage Band and have not encountered any problems yet.

I'll be using it extensively (I hope) this weekend. All of the threads I've found where the device has failed have been posted by professionals who've failed to get the Profire to communicate with ProTools. At this point, I'm wondering if the problem is not with the drivers, but with ProTools.

 

[ivnj]

I have the same problem. My printer supports 10.7 but not 8 or 9. So I use a external hd to boot 10.8 if I must and keep 7 for daily use.

But if want to avoid the external hassle what is good software to use for partitioning without formatting and loosing data. And will 10.9 when comes out soon support dual boot. Or all X's can dual boot. Any issues?

And have they announced a date for 9 yet? Fall is all they said. Any specific date set yet?

 

[Bear]

...
And will 10.9 when comes out soon support dual boot. Or all X's can dual boot. Any issues?

And have they announced a date for 9 yet? Fall is all they said. Any specific date set yet?

The only issues I've seen when having more than one OS X boot partition mounted is that sometimes an application update will update the one on the wrong partition. I haven't had 2 boot partitions connected in a long while, so this may be a non issue now.

As for the date of Mavericks, it's still a guessing game as indicated in all the other threads about it. Best guess is the end of this month or early next month.