Answers...

to commonly asked questions.

Do I have to buy iWork twice?

Hi Scotty,
I have had a huge problem with the laptop. I was downloading new iTunes, the EFI Update, and 10.7.2. I left the computer on so it could download it all. When I came back to it, it gave me the message that there was nothing to boot from. I panicked and booted into recovery mode. The HD is fine so when I clicked restore lion from the menu, it stayed on verifying computer forever so I cancelled it. I then decided to use my install disk for 10.6.7 (snow leopard). I restarted holding the option key a booted into the disk. I chose to install SL and it worked and told me to restart. But every time I shut down and power back up or restart it just freezes up while the circle under the apple logo is spinning. I just cannot figure out what has happened.

Here are some things that happened differently than normal

•in recovery mode, it made me agree to all these terms and conditions and it was scrolling all these languages around it
•it did not wipe my HD because it still can see my partition and it knows that I have 260 gigs left
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Sounds like you really got yourself in a mess.  The only way to downgrade from 10.7 back to 10.6 is wipe the entire drive.  The newer 10.7 users folder is full of files that 10.6 has no idea how to read so it sounds like since you've taken the step of reinstalling 10.6 you may have no choice but to reinstall 10.6 again and completely erase the drive, create a test user, update to 10.6.8, reinstall 10.7 from the app store, run all the 10.7.2 updates, then recover from your time machine backup.  You do have a time machine backup right?

The issue is not that the information is lost. Your data is still there but it may be useless because the current OS 10.6 isn’t mature enough to understand it. And you can’t simply update 10.6 because the current users aren’t just going to show back up in Lion. I would be interested to know if the recovery partition is still active. You may try to give it one more shot to boot to the recovery partition and reinstall Lion one more time.

It sounds like the EFI or firmware update failed. Always have your computer plugged in during an EFI update.
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