can i run mountainlion AND snow leopard on my mbp

I am running Mountain lion on my macbok pro mid 2010*
..I need to run a Powerpc application, so my question is can I install a seperate operating system on the computer ... snow leopard from .dmg file, without purchasing any additional software, and if not can i do it with purchasing additional software such as vm or whatever that program is called.. i know that bootcamp will only work with windows correct? thanks

You can not legally run OS X in a VM. Also, tell us what operating system was pre-installed on your MBP? If your late 2011 MBP was pre-installed with Lion (which I suspect it was) you will be unable to install Snow Leopard on it.

I apologize it is mid 2010 it came with snow leopard woo

If it's a mid 2010 that came pre-installed with SL, then yes, you can run both SL and ML or Lion together. However, you'll have to setup a partition for SL on the machine and install SL on that partition. Use your original SL disks to install with.

I have a Macbook Air with Mountain Lion. I was reading your thread with interest. I have some older apps that only work with Rosetta (pre-Lion), that I have been unable to use with my Macbook Air. Would it be possible to partition my system and install Snow Leopard on the extra partition in order to access my old Rosetta apps? Can I do this without erasing my current data on disk? I am interested to know how this would then work - do I need to shut down each time I switch operating system, or can they both run at the same time. This would be great for me to move files from one partition to the other. It could be a great benefit, so appreciate your help.

I had been considering getting my old Powerbook repaired (new disk), just to run my older apps, then find a way to move files to my Macbook Air from there.

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as said earlier if your macbook air is old enough it will work after 2011? maybe it cant be done legally. i have a 2010 mac book and i partitioned 2 slots 1 being 20 where i install snow leopard and 1 being 10

i went to disk utility and mounted my snow leopard.dmg onto the 10 gb then rebooted holding option key until i got the option to boot from the 10gb where i installed the sl onto the 20gb partitioned drive, then i booted into that 20 deleted the 10gb partition and now have two operated systems which i switch between using the reboot and option key, you cannot have both booted this way but it is one solution to using older programs, and my mountain lion stayed intact so long as you dont accidently install the snow leopard onto your main 200?gb drive from which was partitioned, i would suggest checking out youtube some videos can be informative

dead_catz said:

as said earlier if your macbook air is old enough it will work after 2011? maybe it cant be done legally.

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My Macbook Air is from mid 2011. It was pre-loaded with Lion and I paid for an upgrade to ML. I also own a licensed copy of Snow Leopard, so do not see an issue of legality, unless I have missed something/

Many thanks for the tips. Sounds like I can have most of my disk for use with Mountain Lion and partition a small area for Snow Leopard and run my older apps from there. It is a bit messy to have to reboot each time I want to run the programs, but I should be able to move files around in real-time. Thanks again.

Macs typically will not run any version of OS X older than the one they shipped with.

The few times I've heard of it being able to be done have been when you have a system that shipped with two different versions of OS X.

e.g. A system that was shipped with (for example) 10.5, 10.6 is released and the later models of that same system were shipped with the new OS X.

Personally, if I were going to try it, would try installing the older version onto an external hard drive rather than playing around with my primary internal drive in this case.

Thanks Bob. That makes sense. It may be safer to go back to my original ideaI of getting my old Powerbook G4 repaired and using that with my older programs. Trying to get everything on my Macbook Air is probably counterproductive. Thanks again.

Yes you can

Lettermuck said:

My Macbook Air is from mid 2011. It was pre-loaded with Lion and I paid for an upgrade to ML. I also own a licensed copy of Snow Leopard, so do not see an issue of legality, unless I have missed something/

Many thanks for the tips. Sounds like I can have most of my disk for use with Mountain Lion and partition a small area for Snow Leopard and run my older apps from there. It is a bit messy to have to reboot each time I want to run the programs, but I should be able to move files around in real-time. Thanks again.

Click to expand...

How to run Power PC applications on a 2012 Macbook Pro

I run a VM of Snow Leopard Server on Mountain Lion

Here's another suggestion: upgrade those apps, find substitutes, or otherwise move on.

If those apps were any good, they'd likely have made the transition to Intel *years* ago. If they weren't, then the developers probably just gave up on em and so should you.

Plenty of good -- nay, great -- alternatives to most PowerPC-era apps (remember, this era ended over SIX YEARS AGO). Let's just say that more than 60 percent of the userbase is on non-Rosetta Intel OS versions (90 percent if you count Snow Leopard) ... they're pretty obviously not having a problem getting stuff done on the Intel base.