How to run both Mt Lion and Leopard on the same MacPro?
April 2, 2013 7:37 PM   Subscribe

I've got an early 2008 Harpertown MacPro that's running 10.5.8 and I'm about to install an SSD into it and put Mt Lion on that, keeping the Leopard drive in there as a multi-boot option for when I need some of the old apps on that. Seems like that'll work, but if anybody's got any tips or caveats, etc., I'd love to hear 'em! A bit more detail...

I do mostly Adobe Creative Suite and Final Cut work now, plus some occasional Logic/NI/SoundTrack audio stuff, and will be upgrading to the latest of these soon or later. The Leopard system is crammed with stuff (mostly no longer used), plus it has lots of daily work-flow tweaks that I'll be trying to retain or improve on, but I need to be sure that I can still do everything I currently rely on, so that's the dual-boot (using SysPrefs usually) idea.

TIA for all replies!
posted by dpcoffin to Computers & Internet (7 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
You're pretty safe to go with the setup you've described. Hold down option when you boot to be shown a list of bootable drives - your Mountain Lion and Leopard drives should both appear there (the same way your bootcamp/windows drive does if you have one).

I've had a similar set up (sans SSD) quite a few times (in the same model Mac Pro that you have) and I've never had a problem booting between OS versions.
posted by elroyel1327 at 8:39 PM on April 2, 2013


Others may have already figured this out, but to avoid confusion, you might want to sync your IMAP mail and Dropbox stuff on only one drive.
posted by bonobothegreat at 8:51 PM on April 2, 2013


Response by poster: Glad to hear it, elroyel...

Interesting idea, just the sort of thing I'm interested to hear about, esp. as I have no idea where or how I'd set up such things, bono... Can you point me at some more detail?

Thanks!
posted by dpcoffin at 10:17 PM on April 2, 2013


I have this setup (plus a windows partition), but find I use Leopard very rarely, basically only for a couple of apps I still need. Yeah, don't run apps that sync (IMAP, Dropbox, iCloud) from the older OS. Otherwise works like a charm.
posted by spitbull at 3:33 AM on April 3, 2013


PS I also did it because I was prepared to hate Lion, but now that I'm used to it I find it superior in every way to Snow Leopard.
posted by spitbull at 3:36 AM on April 3, 2013


The IMAP stuff I mentioned only happens when you're using apple's Mail program to check your gmail (or yahoo mail, etc). If you read a bunch of emails while using one drive, then a month later start up the other drive, it's Mail program will check your online mail account and think that you have a month worth of unread messages.

It's the same with anything you might be syncing in that the server won't be able to recognize which drive is which (since they'll likely be set up with the same login and password info).
posted by bonobothegreat at 8:24 AM on April 4, 2013


Response by poster: Well, it's done, writing from Safari 6 and my Internet Mission Control desktop (actually loving MC) right now, seems to be problem-free the few times I've switched. Good tip about not opening mail when back in Leopard!

Thanks all!
dpc
posted by dpcoffin at 4:15 PM on April 7, 2013


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