iOS 9 bricked my iTunes under Snow Leopard, a question for fellow 1,1 and 2,1 owners on upgrade path

[StructAural]

I recently updated my iPhone 5s to iOS9 to see what all the fuss was about, unfortunately (even though I used version 11.4 to upgrade my phone), as soon as it restarted it refused to connect to my version of iTunes under Snow Leopard.

I'm really annoyed about this, but there seems to be little I can do. Mainly for the lack of warning that my iTunes would become unuseable and the lack of ability to downgrade my phone to a version of iOS that would work with my iTunes as they immediately unsigned 8.4.1.
I have 8 years of music and video that I can no longer use. Can't backup or sync and all that jazz.
The option I'm told by Apple is to buy a new computer, but I don't fancy that just to sync my phone, and I'm not a laptop/iMac person.

So, as Apple don't care about bricking my mac-iphone experience my only course of action is to upgrade my operating system from Snow Leopard using the tricks found in this forum. I don't really want to do this, my system is setup like a dream and I mainly use Photoshop, After Effects and Cinema 4d.

My question to fellow 2,1ers and 1,1ers and people who still love SL is: which newer version of OS X is the most stable, least disagreeable, bug free OS that you would recommend to install.
I'll probably try and put it on another volume and keep my SL intact at first.

So which is it, Mountain Lion, Mavericks, Yosemite or EL Capitain?

And also, I should take into consideration - Which is the easiest to install and maintain with the various tricks involved (boot.efi etc...)


tl, dr: I need to upgrade from SL, what would you choose: Mountain Lion, Mavericks, Yosemite or EL Capitain?

Thanks.

 

[AAPLGeek]

Mavericks is pretty good in terms of smoothness and reliability on older machines.

I'm using it on a 2011 MacBook Pro and apparently it feels more responsive than the latest release El Cap. I'd say it's pretty close to Snow Leopard in terms of performance if you're using SSD with 8GB or above RAM.

 

[StructAural]

Cheers AAPLGeek,

That's what I use at work and I quite like it (not mission control or any of that). I'll probably give that a go. Probably the easiest to get to work too. I have an Apple branded ATI 5770 so I assume that would work okay.

Now the difficult part - finding a copy of it.

I've 12GB of RAM and an SSD so no problems there. It still feels snappier than the i7 3.5GHz non-SSD iMac I use at work. Certainly when paging RAM.

 

[austinpike]

I'll probably try and put it on another volume and keep my SL intact at first.

Sounds like a plan, I'd get a new SSD just for the new OS assuming you have room for it. I tend to remove my old system drives and keep them archived in case I need to go back for whatever reason. I'd also vote for Mavericks though I do wonder when support for it will start dropping off...

 

[AAPLGeek]

Cheers AAPLGeek,

Now the difficult part - finding a copy of it.

Well, if it's not available on the App Store you can always torrent it. Remember to match the MD5 of the torrented file with the App Store version to make sure it's unmodified.

 

[StructAural]

Thanks everyone, techy weekend coming up...

 

[MacVidCards]

Definitely do research FIRST and make sure that you will be able to use iPhone in the targeted OS. Absolute keep an older OS installed on a drive and/or an image of it.

People have found dozens of ways to bugger up newer OSs on 1,1 and 2,1 and oddly many do it on only working OS install they have, leading to tears.

Aside from which, maintaining the "unsupported" OS is 1000% easier from an earlier boot disk.

 

[haralds]

I would recommend to search how to upgrade for Yosemite. Lion is very straight forward in your system, but if you are going through the grief of migrating the a 64Bit system, go for the latest stable. El Capitan has a lot of issues right now.

The big question is what is your graphics card? But that will limit you with any of the systems past Lion.

Lion is a straight upgrade - no tricks - and it still support iTunes 12.32.2, which might be enough for iOS 9.

 

[StructAural]

I thought Mountain Lion (10.8) was the first OS to support 12.3.

Lion is the furthest I can 'officially' install.

I have an Apple branded ATI 5770.

 

[StructAural]

All good. Upgraded to Yosemite last night using Pike's bootloader on a separate hard drive. Worked a treat. Still have SL on my SSD. Need to buy another SSD to do Yosemite justice.

But I can sync my iPhone at last..and my computer feels all 'new' again...

 

[Excruciates]

All good. Upgraded to Yosemite last night using Pike's bootloader on a separate hard drive. Worked a treat. Still have SL on my SSD. Need to buy another SSD to do Yosemite justice.

But I can sync my iPhone at last..and my computer feels all 'new' again...

Congrats on the successful upgrade. Hoping to do mine once I've upgraded my cpus. My question is - where did you get your copy of Yosemite from? I looked in the app store and it's gone.

 

[StructAural]

Congrats on the successful upgrade. Hoping to do mine once I've upgraded my cpus. My question is - where did you get your copy of Yosemite from? I looked in the app store and it's gone.

I got it from this post by
Hennesie2000
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...d-os-x-yosemite.1740775/page-88#post-20537556

I also read that entire 150 page thread before starting...

It's hosted by Mega (probably worth installing their software for better download quality)

It's a custom installer that you can copy to a USB and use to boot from in a 1,1 or 2,1 mac. Then install Yosemite onto another hard drive.

 

[Excruciates]

I got it from this post by
Hennesie2000
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...d-os-x-yosemite.1740775/page-88#post-20537556

I also read that entire 150 page thread before starting...

It's hosted by Mega (probably worth installing their software for better download quality)

It's a custom installer that you can copy to a USB and use to boot from in a 1,1 or 2,1 mac. Then install Yosemite onto another hard drive.

Lovely old job. Fair play to you for working your way through the whole lot! (I got through the first 40 pages and the last 20 or so!) - so many thanks for the link. You'll know all too well how much time you saved me! I've got drives with ML installed on a couple of them for emergencies so may well go straight for the installation on my SSD. Cheers.

 

[StructAural]

The only problems I ran into was the USB drive wouldn't show up as a startup disk in Snow Leopard so I blessed the USB in the Terminal and restarted which worked:

sudo bless --mount /Volumes/YOURHARDDIVENAME –setBoot

It also wouldn't initially start the installation on a blank disk so I renamed the blank disk 'installer' and it seemed to do the job.