Upgraded to El Capitan by mistake. PT10 options?

[Eric Lambert]

A friend who primarily records voice over demos via ProTools upgraded to El Capitan and now PT won't operate. She doesn't have a reliable backup so reverting to Yosemite or Mavericks might prove challenging.

One thing to note is that she has 10.3.4 installed. I'll get her my copy of 10.3.10 but I don't know if that'll make any difference (I've not tried El Capitan in any of my studios).

Without a backup, can she realistically migrate her OS backward? Or... would moving from PT 10.3.4 to 10.3.10 be enough to allow her to use ProTools again?

[jeffro]

Others will likely chime in with advice, but I doubt 10.3.10 would help here.

Options:

• Get Mountain Lion ($19.99 unless she has a disc) and create a partition on the drive for a dual boot setup, or add an external drive for ML if needed (<$100)
• Upgrade to 12.3 ($199)

[VRW]

Originally Posted by jeffro

Others will likely chime in with advice, but I doubt 10.3.10 would help here.

Options:

• Get Mountain Lion ($19.99 unless she has a disc) and create a partition on the drive for a dual boot setup, or add an external drive for ML if needed (<$100)
• Upgrade to 12.3 ($199)

+1

Check out the compatibilty yourself.
http://avid.force.com/pkb/articles/d...3-10-Downloads
Check out the upgrade options.
http://www.sweetwater.com/insync/pro...upgrade-chart/

[DJ Hellfire]

You can find a Yosemite (or Mavericks) installer ISO online for free and put it on a thumb drive. Then you can make it bootable. Boot the mac into disk utility and format the hard drive, then install the OS from the thumb drive. The exact instructions on how to do this can be easily found online. I don't know the exact steps off this top of my head, but this is the process.

If the computer is new enough to boot into internet recovery, then you just boot into that, format the hard drive, then reinstall the original OS. I just did this this morning for a friend.

[Eric Lambert]

It's likely not worth it for her to upgrade PT.

What we're hoping to do is keep all her computer's data intact, simply backtracking two iterations to Mavericks. I understand the challenges. If we can avoid a dual-boot scenario we'd be happier, but we might not have another choice.

[c-tone]

Clone the system drive to an external drive and confirm that the backup is good by booting from it. Then erase (reformat) the internal drive and do a fresh install of Mountain Lion or Mavericks. Mountain Lion is the last OS approved by Avid for PT 10, but Mavericks works (except the PT uninstaller). All apps she needs should be reinstalled on the internal drive.

Then, try using Apple Migration Assistant to transfer user data from backup drive to the internal drive. If that doesn't work (it's designed to go to later OS's, not earlier ones), then manually copy the user data from the backup to the internal drive. This can get tricky with user permission / authentication issues, having to get into the system folder to find Mail folders, etc., but if you ever did a clean install of OSX, you might have gone through this before and know more about how to do it.

Hope that works.