[Macworld]

Post your comments for Hands on with Lion Recovery here

[graxspoo]

"it's no substitute for having a reliable, regularly updated backup."

This is what scares me about Apple's move away from having DVD instal disks (and DVD drives for that matter!!!)... So, I have a time machine back-up, but its not bootable, my internal drive dies, I replace the drive, now what?

[ganbustein]

When you say: "just type open /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Base\ System/System/Installation/CDIS/Mac\ OS\ X\ Utilities.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/ (all one line, with no spaces)", what you mean is "all one line, but don't omit any of the eight very important spaces in that line (or add a ninth)".

[StephenGoodalxeym]

I installed on a external and it did put on the recovery partition FYI.

[pmbx]

OK. Installed Lion. Now Safari 5.1 WON'T OPEN and CAN'T be deleted or moved or reinstalled in any way shape or form. Trying reinstall now... from the downloaded copy of Install OS X Lion that I saved in a separate folder so it wouldn't get deleted.

[mr.steevo]

graxspoo, on 20 July 2011 - 03:10 PM, said:

"it's no substitute for having a reliable, regularly updated backup."

This is what scares me about Apple's move away from having DVD instal disks (and DVD drives for that matter!!!)... So, I have a time machine back-up, but its not bootable, my internal drive dies, I replace the drive, now what?

Then you either use the DVD that you made of the Lion OS when you downloaded it or you go to the Apple Store and buy Lion on a thumb drive for $69. If you bought a 2011 Air or mini without a disc drive then you don't have to worry as the newest Macs have a firmware that calls to Apple's servers and re-installs Lion on your new drive.

Not scary. Just different.

[Dan Frakes]

ganbustein, on 21 July 2011 - 12:39 AM, said:

When you say: "just type open /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Base\ System/System/Installation/CDIS/Mac\ OS\ X\ Utilities.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/ (all one line, with no spaces)", what you mean is "all one line, but don't omit any of the eight very important spaces in that line (or add a ninth)".

Oh, good point. Will edit.

[quattleb]

Disk Utility WILL see the partition. Launch DU and on the left click the item for the drive (not the line with the name of the Hard Drive). Then click the "Partition" tab.

In each of my Lion cases I now see a 650MB "Free Space" partition has appeared. This has got to be "Recovery HD" as no free space was there before and it is the correct size.

[Dan Frakes]

quattleb, on 21 July 2011 - 12:08 PM, said:

Disk Utility WILL see the partition. Launch DU and on the left click the item for the drive (not the line with the name of the Hard Drive). Then click the "Partition" tab.

In each of my Lion cases I now see a 650MB "Free Space" partition has appeared. This has got to be "Recovery HD" as no free space was there before and it is the correct size.

On our test Macs, this is not the case. Disk Utility shows only a single partition (the startup volume), which is, of course, a bit smaller than it "should" be, due to the fact that some of its space has been taken by the invisible Recovery HD partition.

One place you can see it, however, is if you open the System Information utility (in /Application/Utilities), choose File: Show System Report, and click the Serial-ATA item on the left. Near the bottom of the entry for your startup drive, you'll see a 650MB partition called Apple_Boot.

[whitedog]

If you have a utility like Cocktail you can turn on the Debug menu in Disk Utility. Near the bottom of this menu you can check Show every partition. This will expose the EFI partitions for each drive and the Recovery partition, if it exists, for Lion. With this I was able to determine that a recovery partition was not included with the Lion upgrade I applied. I had divided my 1 GB drive into two partitions so that I could clone Snow Leopard to the second one and test Lion there while preserving my Snow Leopard partition for security reasons (I also have a Boot Camp partition on the drive). I believe the ability to change a drive's partitions without data loss was added to Disk Utility in OS X 10.5 Leopard. Anyway, it works - if you are careful. I went to the trouble of defragmenting my system drive with TechTool Pro before repartitioning it to insure there was plenty of free space for the second partition.

However, there is a good solution for the no recovery partition problem - creating a bootable copy of the Lion installer on a DVD or flash drive. Macworld has published instructions for doing this, as has MacFixIt. I tested both methods; the DVD is painfully slow, but the flash drive works fine. This installer provides the same options as the recovery disk, with the added advantage that you don't have to download or authenticate Lion to install or reinstall it. Flash drives (I used an 8 GB drive - a 4 GB drive is not quite big enough) are very affordable now so there's no good reason for not taking this precaution. And it's much cheaper than paying Apple to set up a thumb drive for you, assuming you can download the Lion installer in the first place. This is a good system, too, if you have more than one Mac on which you need to install Lion. It's quicker to boot from a thumb drive than to copy the installer to each computer.

[PMC]

Will the Lion Recovery Partition be created if I do a clean install from a flash drive on an erased hard drive?
I think it will only be created when starting the Installer from Snow Leopard as in Bootcamp.

[whitedog]

PMC, on 24 July 2011 - 11:11 PM, said:

Will the Lion Recovery Partition be created if I do a clean install from a flash drive on an erased hard drive?
I think it will only be created when starting the Installer from Snow Leopard as in Bootcamp.

Why don't you try it and let us know.

[PMC]

whitedog, on 25 July 2011 - 01:56 AM, said:

PMC, on 24 July 2011 - 11:11 PM, said:

Will the Lion Recovery Partition be created if I do a clean install from a flash drive on an erased hard drive?
I think it will only be created when starting the Installer from Snow Leopard as in Bootcamp.

Why don't you try it and let us know.

I'm not willing to go through the hassle of reinstalling Snow Leopard if that doesn't work.

[whitedog]

PMC, on 25 July 2011 - 07:53 AM, said:

whitedog, on 25 July 2011 - 01:56 AM, said:

PMC, on 24 July 2011 - 11:11 PM, said:

Will the Lion Recovery Partition be created if I do a clean install from a flash drive on an erased hard drive?
I think it will only be created when starting the Installer from Snow Leopard as in Bootcamp.

Why don't you try it and let us know.

I'm not willing to go through the hassle of reinstalling Snow Leopard if that doesn't work.

OK. I tried it - to have a look at what's unique to Lion, like fonts and such. And yes, the Recovery HD was created on a clean external drive, installing Lion from a flash drive. But I wouldn't erase a drive I needed for other purposes. If you want a clean install of Lion I suggest you get another external drive. Don't sacrifice your Snow Leopard system in any case. Chances are good you'll want to return to it. I did. Lion has too many problems for me right now. If you want to experiment, you cannot have too many extra hard drives.

This post has been edited by whitedog: 25 July 2011 - 12:05 PM