orrinfacey01: 10.7: How to get a full Lion install disc for a new MacBook Air or Pro

Monday, September 12, 2011

10.7: How to get a full Lion install disc for a new MacBook Air or Pro

I've found a way to get a full Lion installer by capturing the installer files that the recovery partition downloads. This seems to work on my 2008 MBP machine with the App Store version of Lion installed on it, but it should be of particular interest to users of the new MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros which don't come with an install disk, but can't install the App Store version of Lion. By following this hint, it should be possible to get a full Lion install disk for those machines that won't require network access to install.

To avoid messing up your one and only good Lion installation, I recommend getting an external drive big enough to install Lion on. An external hard drive or separate partition is great. A large USB flash drive might work, but I haven't tried it.

As we all know, the Recovery HD lets you reinstall Lion by downloading it from Apple's servers. Unfortunately, it deletes itself after installation, so it doesn't give you a chance to make a boot dis ...