If you have upgraded to OSX Mountain Lion recently and now want to downgrade to OSX Lion you are at a loss , there aren’t many guides available on the net and for the past 3 days I’d been trying different ways to get rid of Mountain Lion to get back to Lion and my last attempt succeeded .
P.S : This guide is only for those who didn’t made any backup of Lion like me .
Things which you will need are
1) External Hard Disk for backup
2) atleast 2GB Flash Drive
3) a computer running OSX ( you can use your Mountain Lion running machine)
4) High Speed Internet with Ethernet connection
5) a lot of Patience
The steps to get back to Lion are as follows
1) make a copy of every thing you want to save off your hard disk on an external source as you will loose everything .
2) have a atleast 2GB FLash Drive and install Lion Recovery Disk Assistant v 1.0 from HERE
3) Install the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant on the Flash Drive
4) Restart your OSX machine ( Mac Mini 2011 in my case) with the prepared Flash Drive and keep OPTION key pressed when you heart the start chime ( also works with wireless keyboard)
5) you will be presented with multiple options including Recovery HD ( your Flash Disk ) and Mountain Lion Recovery
6) Choose Disk tools format your hard disk ( you will loose everything , can’t say anything about partition as I didn’t had any )
7) Connect Ethernet connection to machine ,restart it with OPTION key pressed , choose Recovery HD and choose Lion Recovery which will install the appropriate version of OSX Lion in about 6 hours.
The solution which I’ve tried and failed were
1) Use DVD I made from OSX Lion which I downloaded from MAC Appstore for my MAcBook Pro
2) Downloaded copies of OSX Lion from IMZDL and other Torrent Sites and use USB boot method
All attempts resulted in me getting a STOP Sign whenever I tried to install with only the above method working.
In case you have any queries feel free to contact me on Twitter at @schawlaf for quick reply.
