Installing Lion on new iMac

[Doc Mitchell]

Hello,

I bought a new iMac just a few days ago. It has Mountain Lion Pre-installed and it doesn't support my Presonus Firebox sound card so I tried to install Lion and even Snow Leopard on a separate partition of the hard drive but it doesn't seem to work. Does anybody know what to do? I already paid quit a bit for the iMac and I wasn't planning on buying a new sound card just yet.

 

[343matt]

Lion Install

Hi, you wont be able to install Lion 10.7 on a 2012 iMac, as there are no drivers available for it and it wont be able to function correctly. You may be able to return it, and purchase a new 2011 iMac, although it may be difficult to find one. You could buy a newer Mac, that is currently sold, that supports Lion, like the 2012 Non-Retina MacBook Pro. Finding a Lion 1.7 DMG may be difficult.

 

[chrono1081]

Thats a shame its not supported in Mountain Lion. Judging by the tech specs on their site they seem to be pretty far behind the times :/

Also take a look at this thread, there are people who have it working successfully by using an external power supply:

http://forums.presonus.com/posts/list/30351.page

 

[benwiggy]

You would be much better served buying a new sound interface than downgrading your brand new Mac to an old OS.

Sadly, the new iMacs don't have FireWire, which many audio interfaces use, but you can get a TB to FW adaptor. I have an Edirol FA-66, which is compatible with Apple's CoreAudio/CoreMIDI, so it needs no drivers. I got specifically to be future proof. (However, it's FireWire only -- that's part of the reason I got a Mac Mini instead of the iMac!)

Make sure you buy kit from companies that stay up-to-date and publish new drivers quickly. M-Audio took over six months to update their drivers for Snow Leopard; that's why I ditched their hardware.

As said, you can't run older OSes on new Macs, because the old software doesn't have the drivers for the new hardware.

 

[Doc Mitchell]

So I might go for a used Edirol FA-66... From what I believe it has a Firewire 800. I already got the adaptors Thunderbolt/Firewire and also a Firewire800/400 just in case. I might try to trade the Firebox in my local music store. Thanks for the help!

 

[Doc Mitchell]

I managed to get a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 for a cheap buck trading the Firebox. It runs with a USB cable and seems to be working good so far