Snow Leopard May Not Purr On a New MacBook Air

By

Snow-Leopard

Did you just get a beautiful, new MacBook Air? Apple’s new notebooks are super-slim, and they work great with OS X Lion.

However, installing Snow Leopard on a 2011 MacBook Air may not go over so well, as Apple’s older cat doesn’t apparently play nice with its newest notebook. Luckily, Apple has published a KnowledgeBase article to help you fix Snow Leopard on your brand new MacBook Air.

Installing OS X Snow Leopard on a 2011 MacBook Air could result in the following issues:

  • The computer begins to start up normally to a gray screen with the Apple logo, then switches to display a progress indicator (a spinning gear) for a few seconds. Then the built-in display changes to black and the LCD backlight remains lit. This symptom usually appears when you attempt to start up with a version of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard or earlier.
  • A prohibitory sign (a circle with a line through it) appears on the screen. The computer then powers off after about a minute. This may occur if you install a version of Lion other than the version originally installed on your MacBook Air.

If you have one of these problems on your 2011 Air running Snow Leopard, try these steps:

Reinstall the proper operating system build by restarting the computer while pressing and holding the Command and “R” keys. The right revision of Mac OS X for this computer should be available for installation through the Mac OS X Utilities pane that opens.

You can verify if the wrong version of Lion is installed (as in the second symptom) by starting the computer in verbose mode:

  1. Shut down the computer.
  2. Restart the computer while you press and hold the Command and “V” keys.
  3. The text on the display should say, “This version of Mac OS X is not supported on this platform!”.

Exit verbose mode by pressing and holding the power button until the computer shuts down.

Obviously, it’s recommended that you have OS X Lion running on a new MacBook Air for the best experience. It’s available for $30 in the Mac App Store.

You can view and rate Apple’s KnowledgeBase article on this topic here.

Update: Readers have noted that Apple’s article provides information on installing OS X Lion, not fixing Snow Leopard. We apologize for the confusion.

[via MacTrast]

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