Lion Dmg Mac OS X Utilities Window

In the Mac OS X Utilities window, click Reinstall Mac OS X and click Continue.

One of the premier troubleshooting features of Lion (Mac OS X 10.7) is Lion Recovery.

If you ever have system or drive issues, Lion Recovery lets you boot your Mac into a special recovery mode to check or repair your hard drive, browse the Web for troubleshooting help, restore your drive from a backup, or even reinstall Lion itself.

See our hands-on with Lion Recovery for all the details.).

Its a convenient feature that, in theory, means you no longer have to carry a Mac OS X Install disc or a bootable external hard drive.

But as I explained when Lion debuted, there are still good reasons to have a bootable installer disc or drive.

For example, if you want to install Lion on multiple Macs, a bootable installer drive can be more convenient than downloading or copying the entire Lion installer to each computer.

But even for troubleshooting, a bootable installer drive has advantages over Lion Recovery.

For starters, Lion Recovery doesnt include the full Lion installerit requires you to download nearly 4GB of data before you can reinstall Lionwhereas a bootable installer drive contains the entire Lion installer, making installation much, much faster.

And if youve got a Mac that doesnt support Lion Internet Recoverya version of Lion Recovery based on special firmwarerecovery mode may not even be available if your Macs drive itself is having problems, whereas a bootable install drive will always be there for you.

Lion Internet Recovery is available on mid-2011-or-later Macs, as well as some older Macs that have received recent firmware updates.).

Lion Dmg How To Create A

When Lion debuted, I explained how to create a bootable Lion-installer drive from the Mac App Store version of Lion.

But if you have a Mac that debuted after Lion (any Mac from July 2011 or later), your Mac shipped with Lion pre-installed.

Apple does offer a utility for creating an emergency Lion Recovery drive but, like the standard Lion Recovery feature, this drive requires you to download the full 4GB of Lion each time you want to installits better to have the full installer on a bootable drive.

In our testing, the official OS X Lion USB Thumb Drive doesnt work with Macs that shipped with Lionits designed for installing the OS on pre-Lion Macs.).

Fortunately, its possible to create a bootable Lion installer even if your only Mac is a newer model, although doing so requires a bit more work.

As long as your downloaded installer is version 1.0.13 or laterselect the installer in the Finder and use the Get Info command to checktheres no need to perform the procedure below.

Those simpler instructions will create a drive that works with all current Lion-compatible Macs.

But because these may not be options if your Mac is having problems, its still good to have a bootable installer drive.).

When you use Lion Internet Recovery to reinstall Lion, your Mac contacts Apples servers, identifies itself, and requests the appropriate Lion-install data.

Apples servers verify the Mac model and then, assuming its a Mac compatible with Lion Internet Recovery, provide the roughly 4GB of data for download.

Once that data has been downloaded, Lion Recovery restarts your Mac, immediately installs the OS, and then deletes the installer data.

The trick is to interrupt that processsafelyso you can grab the installer data and keep it.

Boot into recovery mode by holding down CommandR at startup; youll eventually see a Mac OS X Utilities window.

Connect a drivea hard drive, a thumb drive, or the likewith at least 12GB of free space.

The drive must be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), and must have a GUID Partition Table.

Follow Steps 1 through 4 in this slideshow to properly format the drive.