Lion Recovery Disk Assistant

Update - I've updated this post following on some further information provided by Apple

Apple yesterday released a new utility to assist in helping you if your hard disk goes completely AWOL. As part of the standard installation process, when you install Lion, a separate "invisible" Recovery Partition is created on your hard drive. This is intended to allow you to re-install Lion for whatever reason, but only on the machine it's installed on.

This won't help if your complete hard disk fails and you can't access the Recovery partition. Newer Macs are OK (the latest Mac minis and MacBook Airs) as they can boot into recovery mode and restore from Apple's servers.

However, it is possible to create a copy of the Lion installer on a USB drive, but only if you know what to do during the install and deviate slightly from the standard path. If you don't, the installer will get deleted by default, once Lion is installed. As well as having a physical copy of Lion to re-install, having a USB installer does allow you to install on multiple machines from the USB.

A lot of people didn't know about this technique and consequently don't have a physical copy of Lion to re-install.

Enter the "Lion Recovery Disk Assistant"

It looks like that this tool just allows you to create an external Recovery partition on a USB drive or external hard drive. So if your hard drive fails and you can't access the installed Recovery partition, you can boot from your Lion Recovery Disk Drive.

Some caveats though…

• The Lion Recovery Disk Assistant software will only work on a machine with an existing Recovery Partition
• If you create the external recovery drive with a computer that shipped with Lion, it will only work on that computer
• If create the external recovery drive with a computer that was upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion, the external recovery drive will work on other systems that were upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion

So it's a step in the right direction and will allow you some piece of mind to have a fallback position if your hard drive fails, but it's not a full blown installer.

Pity!

Comments

[Richard]

This is the best post I read yet about the Lion Recovery Disk Drive. Your two caveats are worth a year's subscription price to ScreenCastsOnline.

[Bruce Guthrie]

Hi Don,

AppleInsider reported:

"Apple also notes that if the Recovery HD is created for a Mac that shipped with Lion, the external recovery drive can only be used with that system. However, if the the assistant is run on a Mac that upgraded to Lion from Mac OS X Snow Leopard, then the external recovery drives can be used on other systems that upgraded from Snow Leopard."

Sounds like the Recovery HD can be used on multiple Macs if upgraded from Snow Leopard? Did you find that to be true?

Thanks for all you do in keeping us "up to date"! ;-)

[Don McAllister]

Hi Bruce,

Updated the post after reading Apples more detailed information. Not tried it myself but no reason to believe it won't work as described.

[Nicholas Smith]

Why not just make a full-blown Lion Disk from any standard 4GB USB key that will boot, repair and install OS 10.7 just fine (SL update or clean install)!

Just head over to http://blog.gete.net/lion-diskmaker-us for full instructions.

Enjoy!

[Jon]

For MAC disk recovery go to this website http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php