iMac 27 dual boot nightmare

[mungo77]

Hi, I'm beginning to think my purchase of a shiny new iMac 27 was a big mistake - any knowledgeable advice welcome:
Firstly, It's quickly becoming apparent that much of my essential software will not work in Mavericks (logic 8, FCP6 - which many of my clients still use so I need FCP6 for compatibility with their jobs).
No problem I thought, I'll just create a partition and install Snow Leopard or Lion and use that when needed. It worked on my 2011 MBP (but the other way around: it already had SL installed, I just created a partition and installed Mavericks - works like a charm).
But installing an older OS X on a Mavericks system doesn't seem to be so easy. I guess I just need to know if i'm wasting my time trying to get this to work or has Apple truly shafted me?

As you can see from the attached pic. I managed to successfully partition the HD (approx 650GB Mavericks, 300+GB empty partition ready for snow leopard)
Disk Utility shows the partition and it's mounted on the Desktop, but it doesn't appear in Startup Disk or when i reboot and hold down 'ALT'.

Is there something very basic i'm missing here?

 

[Macman45]

Apple have not "shafted" you. Times move on and software gets updated..a pure fact of life...The drivers on newer Mac's need newer OS versions to be implemented. If it's possible to install the older version on a separate partition then somebody here will know how.

It's a little like my own experience with clients who simply refused to upgrade old software packages...importing into the new versions was an easy job, they just didn't want to pay the money, so I asked them where they wanted to go, explaining that running older hardware takes longer per job, and that I had no intention of running legacy on any of my machines.

Result? About a month after I'd sent out the emails, all but one client had purchased the required upgrade for the software involved.

It's not Apple's fault, nor is it the software developers either. It's just progress.

 

[casperes1996]

SL doesn't support the hardware

Hi, I'm beginning to think my purchase of a shiny new iMac 27 was a big mistake - any knowledgeable advice welcome:
Firstly, It's quickly becoming apparent that much of my essential software will not work in Mavericks (logic 8, FCP6 - which many of my clients still use so I need FCP6 for compatibility with their jobs).
No problem I thought, I'll just create a partition and install Snow Leopard or Lion and use that when needed. It worked on my 2011 MBP (but the other way around: it already had SL installed, I just created a partition and installed Mavericks - works like a charm).
But installing an older OS X on a Mavericks system doesn't seem to be so easy. I guess I just need to know if i'm wasting my time trying to get this to work or has Apple truly shafted me?

As you can see from the attached pic. I managed to successfully partition the HD (approx 650GB Mavericks, 300+GB empty partition ready for snow leopard)
Disk Utility shows the partition and it's mounted on the Desktop, but it doesn't appear in Startup Disk or when i reboot and hold down 'ALT'.

Is there something very basic i'm missing here?

Alright, so your problem here is that SL doesn't support the new hardware. Perhaps it would be possible moving the hardware drivers and controllers onto SL and trick the system into working, but I suggest against it. Surely you can just get the FCP 6 projects upgraded to FCPX and same with Logic?

 

[yjchua95]

Hi, I'm beginning to think my purchase of a shiny new iMac 27 was a big mistake - any knowledgeable advice welcome:
Firstly, It's quickly becoming apparent that much of my essential software will not work in Mavericks (logic 8, FCP6 - which many of my clients still use so I need FCP6 for compatibility with their jobs).
No problem I thought, I'll just create a partition and install Snow Leopard or Lion and use that when needed. It worked on my 2011 MBP (but the other way around: it already had SL installed, I just created a partition and installed Mavericks - works like a charm).
But installing an older OS X on a Mavericks system doesn't seem to be so easy. I guess I just need to know if i'm wasting my time trying to get this to work or has Apple truly shafted me?

As you can see from the attached pic. I managed to successfully partition the HD (approx 650GB Mavericks, 300+GB empty partition ready for snow leopard)
Disk Utility shows the partition and it's mounted on the Desktop, but it doesn't appear in Startup Disk or when i reboot and hold down 'ALT'.

Is there something very basic i'm missing here?

Well the SL partition obviously doesn't show up as a startup disk because:
1. There's no OS installed on it yet. A disk will only appear in the startup pane only when there is a working OS installed on it.
2. Late-2013 iMacs will not even run on Lion, much less Snow Leopard.

As stated by Macman45, get your clients to upgrade. Older hardware - slower task - less features - less productivity.

 

[Fishrrman]

The OP asks:
[[ Is there something very basic i'm missing here? ]]

Yes, there is.

You cannot directly boot newer Macs to older versions of the OS. It won't work. There may be a few exceptions here and there, but I don't think they apply to you.

What you CAN do, if you ABSOLUTELY have-to-have an OS like Snow Leopard on a late-model Mac:

You could install an emulator such as VMWare Fusion, and then get ahold of a copy of Snow Leopard SERVER, which is still available.

Install SLS as a virtual machine under VMWare Fusion (or Parallels, I believe), and you will have an operable copy of Snow Leopard on the iMac.

There is an extensive discussion about this over at macintouch.com.
I strongly suggest you visit there and read up on it...

 

[mungo77]

wow! thank you for the quick response. the more I dig the more I realize there is no backward-compatibility like there was in the Rosetta days.

I agreed on the whole that progress is good and newer software will (usually) provide far more benefits.

Naively I thought that because my 2011 MBP i5 can run Mavericks and SL on a dual-boot setup, my 2013 iMac i5 could do the same and I wouldn't have to spend even more money on upgrading so many bits of software just so I can have continuity with my clients and with my laptop.
I should have researched it i guess?

Don't get me wrong, i'm not afraid of new software: I use FCPX a lot, and it's ok for most tasks but there are still times when FCP6/7 can be much quicker because of it's simplicity. My beef is with Apple refusing to allow any kind of legacy support for 32bit software, not because they can't but because they won't. - but that's a whole other can of worms!

Anyway...I'm trying a 30 day trial of VMware to run Lion. If that works it will get me through the transition period and into the 21st century.

As far as the partition not showing until the OS is installed: that kind of makes sense - thank you for that bit of info - i was presuming it would act like a PC and show up during the boot/install phase, waiting for the OS to be installed but I guess OS X is a bit smarter than that.

thank you for your input.