Apple has made disk recovery simple by including a Lion Recovery utility that lets you repair or reinstall OSX Lion without the need for a physical disc. The utility is installed on a separate partition on the SSD drive that is accessed by pressing and holding the ‘option’ key during the boot-up process.
But what happens in the event that your internal drive and recovery partition become damaged or unreadable? Well Apple has you covered, it offers OSX Lion on a $69 USB drive. So why would anyone pay $69.00 for $29.00 Mac App Store download? Unless you don’t have access to a broadband Internet connection there is a better option, the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant.
The Lion Recovery Disk Assistant is a free download available from Apple that will let you create a Lion Recovery boot disk on an external drive that has all the same capabilities as the built-in Lion Recovery Disk. You can reinstall Lion, repair the disk using the Disk Utility, restore from a Time Machine backup, or browse the web with Safari.
The utility is drop dead simple to use. Insert an external USB drive, select the drive within the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant and follow the on-screen prompts. Note the recovery utility will not recognize an SD card inserted in a 13” Macbook Air as a valid install drive.
The new partition created using the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant is not visible in the Finder or Disk Utility. To access the external recovery disk, insert the USB drive containing the recovery partition, reboot the computer while holding the option key and select the external partition from the startup manager.
In order to use the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant you need a Mac running OS X Lion with an existing Recovery HD and an external USB Hard drive or thumb drive with at least 1GB of free storage.
Filed under: Apple, Software, Apple, Boot disk, Disk Utility, Finder, http://technology-headlines.com, Lion recovery disk, Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, Mac App Store, Mac OS X Lion, OS X Lion, OSX, OSX Lion 10.7.1, Recovery boot disk on external drive, Recovery disc, recovery partition, RecoveryDiskAssistant.dmg, repair or reinstall Lion, restore, SD Card, SSD drive, techeadlines, technology headlines, The Lion Recovery Dist Assistant, Time Machine, USB flash drive, USB Hard drive, utility
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