Apple Launches OS X Lion Recovery Disk Assistant

The Lion Recovery Disk Assistant lets create Lion Recovery on an external drive that has all of the same capabilities as the built-in Lion Recovery: 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.

Products Affected

• OS X Lion

System requirements

• A Mac running OS X Lion with an existing Recovery HD
• An external USB hard drive or thumb drive with at least 1GB of free space

How to use Lion Recovery Disk Assistant
The Lion Recovery Disk Assistant will erase all data on the external drive when creating the Recovery HD. You should either backup your data before running the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, or create a new partition on the external drive.

If you need to create a new partition on the external disk
Open Lion Recovery Disk Assistant and follow the on screen instructions to create a Recovery HD on the external drive. When the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant completes, the new partition will not be visible in the Finder or Disk Utility. To access the external Recovery HD, connect the drive, then restart the computer and hold the Option key. Select Recovery HD from the Startup Manager.

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.

To download the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant