[Mary_Henry]

I did an archive and install of Lion on my 2010 macmini with 4 GB RAM. Nothing that I read about it beforehand told me that it was going to completely change my sidebar. I'm not talking about the colors or icons, I mean it removed the items I had added to the sidebar. I had links to folders on three different external hard drives that are now gone with no way to call back even a screen shot of what was there, let alone where it was linked. I did the upgrade in June, just before my summer travel, so am just now finding out what a pickle I'm in.

It seems that what could be done is make a partition on my mini and install Snow Leopard there, so that I can restore the earlier environment with Time Machine and make notes on my links to recreate them in Lion.

I made such a partition with Disk Utility, but cannot install SL there because the computer won't boot into the Snow Leopard install disk with either the C key on restart OR the option key to bring up choices, then selecting the install disk. All I get are kernel panics.

Is there anything else I can try? Or does anyone know how I could get my sidebar restored to the pre-Lion configuration?

[charley]

Hello,

I found myself in a similar situation with a MBP that shipped with Lion pre-installed. I wished to install snow leopard in order to use some older PPC apps. I first attempted installing using an install disc from a MBP of the same generation and spec as my own one that shipped with snow leopard installed, but no joy - refused to boot from dvd, (possibly something do with firmware on lion machines?). The work round was to boot my MBP in target dic mode ( hold down "t" at start up ) and connect to another machine with a firewire cable and then install from the other machine. When you machine is booted in target disc mode your helper machine can mount it as an external firewire disc. I now have a snow leopard and a lion partition on my machine and can boot from either as required. There is also quite a lot of info on apple's support forums.

Charley