Apple Introduces Lion Recovery Disk Assistant for External Drives

Apple has announced the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, which allows a user to repair disks or reinstall OS X Lion without a physical disk. According to the support website of Apple, one can create Lion Recovery on an external drive that has the same capabilities as the built-in Lion Recovery. These include the ability for a user to be able to reinstall Lion, as well as repair the disk using Disk Utility. Other features include capabilities to restore from a Time Machine backup or browse the web using Safari.

Lion Recovery for external drives now available

The Cupertino-based company stated that in order to create a Lion Recovery using this assistant, the user’s Mac should have an existing Recovery HD and an external USB hard drive or thumb drive with at least 1GB of free space. The setup process is simple and all one has to do is download the 1.07 MB application and insert an external drive. Once the application is launched, a user can select the drive where they would like to install the software and then follow the on-screen instructions.

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The release notes state that when the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant completes, the new partition will not be visible in the Finder or Disk Utility. Rather, to access Lion Recovery, one would have to reboot the computer while holding the Option key and then select Recovery HD from the Startup Manager. For further details on Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, click here.