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    Of possible interest... Lion Recovery Disk Assistant

    Discussion in 'Apple and Mac OS X' started by SP Forsythe, Aug 9, 2011.

  1. SP Forsythe

    SP Forsythe Notebook Evangelist

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    Apple has released a booting and recovery tool for Lion that can be put on a flash drive.

    Here is more information...

    Lion Recovery Disk Assistant
     
    SP Forsythe, Aug 9, 2011
    #1
  2. ClearSkies

    ClearSkies Well no, I'm still here..

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    The Lion RDA does not write a full copy of Lion to the external drive or USB, however - only the recovery software. If you use this and need to reinstall Lion, the software downloads it again over the internet which is going to take a while with 4GB of data. It will work fine for reinstall from a Time Machine backup, however.

    Better to create a bootable Lion installer on a 4GB USB key using this donationware utility, which would not require re-download of the .app file to do a full Lion reinstall. You need to format the USB in OS X extended journaled before you use it for this, and the utility takes about 10 min to complete the task.

    One can also follow the instructions here @ MacWorld, but this requires either a DVD or 8GB USB key - won't start to restore copy onto a 4GB one (as I discovered).
     
    ClearSkies, Aug 9, 2011
    #2
  3. ygohome

    ygohome Notebook Deity

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    WHat are the recovery tools that Lion offers? I've not explored them yet. My idea of recovery is reimaging my system and/or bootcamp partitions from backups to new HDDs if the current HDDs crash. Or reimaging my system and/or bootcamp to the same drives after I first reformat them incase I've royally messed my systems up (but the hdd itself is still okay). I also use dropbox for my personal and business documents and software development source files, etc.

    I restored the Lion installESD.dmg to a USB flash as the macWorld link shows how to do. I have a 16GB USB so I didn't have any issue with USB space. I don't use CDs or DVDs anymore because I tend to scratch and damage them after a few months.

    Then I used the USB thumb drive with the restored installESD.dmg to install Lion OS X and all of my backup recovery tools onto a 2.5" 80GB external bare drive that I had salvaged from a broken PS3. * I could actually install Lion plus all my backup/recovery tools onto a 16GB flash drive but for some reason running lion from a USB flash drive causes my backup rates to drop drastically vs using a HDD.

    Anyways, I use this PS3 drive which contains a full Lion OS X installation and tools when I need to dismount my primary system drive to clone a drive or make block level image backups. Much much faster than trying to use CCC while you are still mounted to the drive you are backing up (100+MB per second vs 25 MB per second).
     
    ygohome, Aug 9, 2011
    #3
  4. ClearSkies

    ClearSkies Well no, I'm still here..

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    MacWorld has today published an article discussing Recovery Assistant and compares with Bootable USB/DVD.
     
    ClearSkies, Aug 10, 2011
    #4