Can I go from El Capitan to Snow Leopard?

[lara4unow]

Hi
I am new but hope to make this my one stop short of calling Apple.
I want to completely clear all of the El Capitain system I was given by Apple when my Mac mini was caught in a melt down with Snow Leopard. I want to back to Snow Leopard, how do I do this. I have all the bootable disks for the machine, snow leopard and a legal copy of Tiger.

 

[MacInWin]

Welcome to the forum.

Generally, piggybacking on an older thread is not the best way to get your issue out there. This thread discusses how to back up from the beta version. That's not what you want to do.

Maybe a MOD will move this to its own thread.

First question I would ask is "Why?" Why do you want to go back to an unsupported version of OS X? It might be better to try to fix whatever is leading you to that desire. What you want to do can be done, but it has a lot of problems if you have updated any applications in the process of moving up to El Cap. Do you have backups?

 

[Slydude]

I'll add the following to Jake's questions. What are your machine's specs? I assume form your post that this Mac Mini originally shipped with something older. If that is correct and you have the right Snow Leopard disc you can go back but you will need to erase the drive to do it. Be aware that any documents created with newer versions of some apps may not open in the older Snow Leopard versions of the same apps.