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I had the game "Plants vs Zombies" purchased on the Apple App Store (for Mac) when the computer was using Lion. Now I made a new partition and installed Mountain Lion on the new partition.

And when I use the App Store to try and install the game on Mountain Lion, it says it is "Installed", and using the "search" at the top right part of the screen, it actually can find "Plants vs Zombies" and even won't list that it is on "Mac HD" (some apps will show "Mac HD" to tell it is not on this new partition of Mountain Lion, which is call "Mac HD 2".) So it can let me run it... but I think it may be less clean that way.

So is there a way to install it on Mountain Lion? I think it is more robust if the app is installed on Mountain Lion instead of relying on an old partition. (what if the old partition is to be deleted a year from now?). If I Optionclick the "Installed" word on the App Store, it will not do anything.

(I also don't want to just "copy" the app from the old partition to the new partition, as it is some what a brute-force copy and may not be too robust that way).

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  • Are you certain the game is simply not working anymore. It works for me with Mac OS X 10.4.11-10.6.x
    – user28905
    Commented Sep 11, 2012 at 12:51

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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I've run into this before, and there really isn't a perfectly clean way to do it. However - if I wanted to trick it...
If you unmounted the disk/partition that had the existing copy on it, then App Store couldn't find it. Have you tried renaming the existing copy, or temporarily moving it off the Lion partition to USB key, then rerunning App Store?

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  • wow... this kind of hacks the system... but I suppose if I never boot up to the old partition during this "hack", it should be cleaner... I wonder why Option-click is not made to work...
    – nonopolarity
    Commented Sep 4, 2012 at 4:03
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Just move the app from a backup copy or the other drive into /Applications. There is nothing the app store does when installing an app.

The root cause of the failure was probably a spotlight problem and the option click tells the app store to ignore spotlight and let you force a clean download.

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  • but Option-click won't work... could there be any settings or game state already in the Application/Plants vs Zombie folder in the old partition already?
    – nonopolarity
    Commented Sep 4, 2012 at 4:02
  • That would be a bit bizarre (and against what most consider good programming practice) to store user preferences and saved game data inside /Applications. I doubt something like that would get through the review process, but I suppose some odd things do sneak by. It's more likely your Mac has corruption issues unrelated to the store itself based on the symptoms you describe.
    – bmike ♦
    Commented Sep 4, 2012 at 13:36

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