Lion Recovery Disk Assistant for Mac

Brief overview

Lion Recovery Disk Assistant is a utility from Apple that lets you put a Lion recovery partition onto an external drive. That external Recovery HD gives you the same repair and reinstall tools you’d normally find on the built-in recovery partition, but stored externally so you can recover when the internal hard drive is unusable.

What you can do with the external Recovery HD

• Reinstall OS X Lion onto your Mac.
• Run Disk Utility to check and repair drives.
• Restore a system from a Time Machine backup.
• Use Safari to browse the web for help while repairing the system.

System requirements

• An external USB flash drive or hard drive with at least 1 GB of free space.
• A Mac capable of running OS X Lion.
• Lion Recovery Disk Assistant (available from Apple).

Creating the external recovery partition

1. Plug the USB stick or external drive into your Mac and make sure it has at least 1 GB free.
2. Download Lion Recovery Disk Assistant from Apple’s support/downloads site.
3. Launch the downloaded assistant application.
4. Pick the external drive or USB stick as the destination for the Recovery HD.
5. Follow the on-screen prompts and wait for the tool to create the recovery partition.

Once finished, the new Recovery HD partition won’t appear in Finder or as a regular volume in Disk Utility.

How to boot from the external Recovery HD

• Restart the Mac while holding the Option (Alt) key.
• In the Startup Manager that appears, choose the Recovery HD entry for the external drive.
• The system will boot into the recovery environment where you can reinstall Lion, run Disk Utility, restore from Time Machine, or open Safari.

Notes and limitations

• The assistant does not produce a standalone DVD or a conventional bootable USB installer; it creates an external Recovery HD partition that contains the recovery system.
• If your internal drive fails completely, the external Recovery HD provides a way to reinstall Lion or recover data, provided you have access to the Mac and the external drive.