Lion-Recovery-Disk-Assistant_header

Apple Releases Utility to Create Lion Recovery USB Key

By JaY Cooper in Mac, News, OSX with 4 comments  Tags: , , ,
09
Aug
2011
http://www.freshapple.in

Apple today released Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, a utility that lets users create a Lion recovery partition on an external drive or USB key. Lion Recovery lets users “repair disks or reinstall OS X Lion without the need for a physical disc.”
Lion-Recovery-Disk-Assistant
To create an external Lion Recovery, download the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant application. Insert an external drive, launch the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, select the drive where you would like to install, and follow the on screen instructions.

When the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant completes, the new partition will not be visible in the Finder or Disk Utility. To access Lion Recovery, reboot the computer while holding the Option key. Select Recovery HD from the Startup Manager.

Lion Recovery Disk Assistant can be downloaded from Apple’s support website.

Apple’s knowledge base article about the utility notes that the partition it creates has all the same capabilities as the Lion Recovery that is installed during a Lion installation. However, this partition could be used in the event a user can’t start their computer from the Recovery partition or if the hard drive is replaced.

[Users can] reinstall Lion, repair the disk using Disk Utility, restore from a Time Machine backup, or browse the web with Safari. This drive can be used in the event you cannot start your computer with the built-in Recovery HD, or you have replaced the hard drive with a new one that does not have Mac OS X installed.

The document has two final notes:

- If the computer shipped with Lion, the external recovery drive can only be used with the system that created it.

- If the system was upgraded from Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard to Lion, the external recovery drive can be used with other systems that were upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion.



[Via MacRumors]

About the author

JaY Cooper
JaY Cooper is the editor and publisher of Fresh Apple, and author of Many Articles for Different Blogs.JaY Has Been Blogging for Over 4 Years And Also sourced Many Articles from Different Technical Reliable Sources.Follow JaY on Twitter @freshapple11 and Facebook. Email The Author

  • Justinfreid

    I’m happy and impressed that Apple released this utility.
    The utility’s notes don’t appear to be complete, though: if it can be used on a new hard drive, why does it matter what type of Lion install you’re creating it from?

  • Milo

    Funny, that’s EXACTLY what I’ve been saying for months that apple should do.

    Really, was that so hard? I don’t get why it wasn’t just ready in time for release, but announced well ahead of time.

  • Jasonsmith

    can I create a new partition for recovery on a NTFS harddrive ?

    • http://www.freshapple.in JaY Srivastava

      You may need to plug it into a Windows box (or arm, boot into Windows if you have it on your Mac) to create a partition, then reformat the new partition within OSX.



Go to the top of the page