Ever tried to restore your Mac OSX Lion because it got crashed? In this week Apple released a free utility referred as Lion Recovery Disk Assistant that has a simple technique for making a official drive for recovering Lion from any 1GB (or larger) USB drive or thumb drive. You'll be able to download Lion Recovery Disk Assistant from Apple’s Support site; it’s concerning 1MB in size. Apple provides some temporary directions for using this utility, however those directions do not provide you the total story—while the utility is indeed easy to use, there are lot additional things you must understand before making and employing a recovery drive. The Lion Recovery Disk Assistant allows you to make Lion Recovery on an external drive that has all of a similar capabilities just like the built-in Lion Recovery: it can reinstall Lion, repair the disk using Disk Utility, restore from a Time Machine backup, or browse the net with Safari.
How to use Lion Recovery Disk Assistant
To use Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, your Mac should already be running Lion and have a Recovery HD partition, because the utility uses the information on Recovery HD to make the Lion Recovery drive. Additionally, the target USB stick or USB drive should be formatted with a GUID partition map. You'll be able to check this by connecting the USB drive, launching Disk Utility (in /Applications/Utilities
), and choosing the drive from the list on the left; partition map type will be displayed close to the bottom of the window, near to Partition Map theme. If the text reads GUID Partition Table, you’re set enough to go on. If it reads Master Boot Record or Apple Partition Map, you would then have to reformat the drive using the GUID partition map. (Confusingly, if you don’t reformat the drive, Lion Recovery Disk Assistant won’t display any alert – it will proceed to make the Recovery HD volume, and it'll even tell you it absolutely was successful. However, your Mac won’t truly be ready to boot from the drive.)
If you’re employing a drive that is considerably larger than 1GB, you can also make two partitions: a 1GB volume for Recovery HD and one or more different partitions for general use. If you don’t take this step, the whole drive are going to be used for Recovery HD, which implies plenty of wasted area on larger drives.
If you have finished reading all this, here’s the way to use Lion Recovery Disk Assistant:
- Connect a USB drive you wish to use for Lion Recovery.
- Launch Lion Recovery Disk Assistant and then click Agree to conform the software license agreement.
- Select the target drive, the one you wish to use for Lion Recovery and click Continue. (If the target drive has multiple partitions, choose the actual partition you wish to use for Recovery HD.) Note that as the onscreen message explains, any information on the chosen drive or partition are going to be erased. You’ll be prompted to produce the name and password for an administrator-level account; do thus and click on OK.
- You’ll see a message that the utility is making the recovery disk. This might too a while (like a couple of minutes or so). Afterward, the utility will verify the disk.
- When the whole process is finished, you’ll see a message that the recovery drive was created successfully. The drive will then be shown in Lion Recovery Disk Assistant with the name Recovery HD.
How To Use Lion Recovery USB drive
To use your new recovery disk, follow these steps:
- Connect your new recovery drive to your Mac’s USB ports.
- Reboot (or boot) your Mac and keep holding down the Option key. After a short period, you’ll see the Startup Manager – a grey screen showing all connected, bootable volumes.
- Choose a local Wi-Fi network right from the pop-up menu and press the network’s password.
- Select Recovery HD and then click the upward-pointing arrow below Recovery HD in addition from it. (If you see 2 volumes named Recovery HD, the one with the USB icon is your USB drive while the other is the recovery partition of your Mac’s internal drive.) You’ll see the Lion Recovery Options within a few moments.
Note that in line with Apple, if you made your new recovery drive on a Mac that originally shipped with Lion, the ensuing recovery drive can work solely with that specific Mac. If you produce your recovery drive on a Mac that was upgraded from Snow Leopard (OSX 10.6) to Lion, the ensuing recovery drive can work on the other Lion-compatible Mac that didn’t ship with Lion. Read more about Lion Recovery Disk Assistant
Brilliant one. I was really needing this.
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