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How to Install & Dual Boot Mac OS X 10.7 and 10.6 Snow

Mac OS X 10.7 can be installed and ran alongside Mac OS X 10.6 on the same drive, all you need to do is partition your existing boot disk and I’m going to show you exactly how to do this in a step-by-step guide

Now I’m going to assume you already have Mac OS X 10.7 Lion downloaded or on a USB thumb drive and ready to go, and that you’re currently running Mac OS X 10.6. Important: Make sure you have a backup of your existing Mac OS X installation disk before continuing with this guide. Any time you edit a drives partition table or install a new there is always a small chance something could go wrong, so just be safe and have a backup ready. Let’s get started!

1) Create a partition for Mac OS X Lion You can create a new partition on your hard drive with , this does not require you to reformat the drive and you should not lose any data (besides, you have that backup just in case something goes wrong, right?). Launch Disk Utility Select your hard drive from the left hand side Click on the “Partition” tab at the top Click on the “+” icon to add a new partition, name it ‘Lion’, or chimichanga, or whatever you want Set the partition size for Lion, I chose 20GB to make it easy Click on ‘Apply’ to create the new partition, and you’ll see a message like this one:

Click on “Partition” to create the partitions as indicated

You’ll now see two partitions on your boot drive in Disk Utility, one that has your existing operating system (Mac OS X 10.6) and the newly created “Lion” partition, which is where you will install Mac OS X 10.7. It will look something like this:

Now that you have the partitions squared away, we’re on to step 2. 2) Install Mac OS X 10.7 Lion on the new partition Now it’s time to install 10.7. The key here is to install Lion on the newly created partition and not the default which is atop 10.6. This is what will enable you to dual boot between 10.7 and 10.6:

Launch the Mac OS X 10.7 Installer and when it asks what drive to install on, choose the options to specify your own At the “Install Mac OS X” screen, click to select the partition that you created in Step 1, I named it Lion as you can see in this screenshot:

Click on “Install” and let the do it’s business

Once the installer is running, you’ll see a screen like this:

Just let this be as it runs. You’ll see a preparation and then your Mac will reboot into the full installer. Due to the fact that you are installing from your local disk or USB thumb drive to another partition, the whole process is much faster than it would be to install from a DVD. On my MacBook Air 11″ the entire Lion installation took about 15 minutes. When Lion is finished installing, your Mac will now automatically boot into 10.7.

3) Set your default boot drive: Mac OS X 10.7 Lion or 10.6 Now that Lion is installed, your default boot drive is set to 10.7. You can adjust this to be 10.6 too:

Launch Click on “Startup Disks” Select your default boot drive and operating system

That’s really all there is to it. 4) Dual Booting: Select which Mac OS X volume to load on boot If you want to boot into a different Mac OS X installation than the one that is set as your default in the previous step, you can hold down the during reboot. You will then see a boot loader like the image at the very top of this tutorial, where you will select the Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard system when you want to run your Violette Learning Company programs.