Should you run into issues down the road, you can boot to the recovery disk by plugging the USB drive into your computer and holding down Option while the Mac boots up. If you would prefer to have a physical installation disc instead of a recovery disk due to the Internet requirement, here's how to create an OS X Lion installation disc. The Recovery HD partition will not be visible in Finder.Without an Internet connection, you will only be able to use the Disk Utility portion of the recovery drive. To reinstall Lion using this recovery disk, an Internet connection is required.However, if the recovery drive was created on a Mac that was upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion, you can use the drive on any computer that followed the same upgrade path.

If this recovery assistant was created on a Mac that shipped with Lion, this recovery drive can only be used with that Mac.

There are a few things to keep in mind when creating and using this type of recovery disk: Once the process is complete you will see a Conclusion screen informing you that the Recovery HD was successfully created. Sit tight check your Facebook or Twitter feed if you get bored. The process takes a few minutes to complete. Select the Recovery HD we created earlier, and click Continue.

You will then be presented with available drives on which to install the recovery disk. Run the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant and accept the terms. You can either run the Assistant from the disk image you just downloaded, or drag the Assistant icon to your Applications folder and run it from there. Next, you will need to download Apple's Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, which you can find here.

Give the partition a size of at least 1GB.ĭisk Utility will now do its magic, after which you will have two partitions on the USB drive.

Set the format to Max OS Extended (Journaled).

Click on the + sign, adding a partition to the drive.

Select the USB drive, then select the Partition tab.

Open Disk Utility (located under Applications > Utilities).

The first thing we will do is partition the required 1GB of free space on the USB drive, allowing the remaining free space on the USB drive to still be used for other things.

An existing Recovery HD on a Mac running OS X Lion.

A USB thumbdrive with 1GB of free space.

Here's how to use a tool Apple just released to create a Lion Recovery HD on a USB drive. This is convenient for many, but it does not sit well for those who prefer to have a physical way to fix problems down the road. With OS X Lion, Apple bucked the traditional method of releasing software on a physical medium, instead opting to release Lion through the Mac App Store.

Mac os x recovery usb drive