How to create a Lion recovery disk

Apple upset many users with the decision not to release a hard copy of Lion in case of system crashes and hardware failure. It’s no surprise then that one user has come up with a solution in the form of Lion Disk Maker – a free tool which creates a Lion recovery disk on a 4GB pen drive.

With it, you can perform a new installation of Lion without the need to download it again from the Apple Mac App Store. This is a big advantage over Apple’s recently released Lion Recovery Disk Assistant which doesn’t create a hard copy of Lion – it merely creates a partition of Lion on a USB stick. Lion Disk Maker creates a Lion installation file from the Lion DMG file that you originally download from the App Store when you installed it. All you need is a USB stick or external drive of at least 4GB and Lion Disk Maker extracts enough data to create a bootable version of Lion.

How does it work?

Lion Disk Maker uses Spotlight to automatically scan your Mac for the Lion-installation file. Unlike Apple’s official Lion Recovery Disk Assistant all you need is the USB stick to restore Lion – no Internet connection is needed to re-download Lion unlike with Apple’s tool.

What if I don’t have my Lion DMG file anymore?

No problem. You can simply re-download it from the App Store. Simply go into purchase history and click on OS X Lion while holding the option key to start a new download of Lion. Since you’ve already paid for it once, you won’t be charged for it again.

Lion Disk Maker is an excellent tool that creates a reliable bootable recovery disk for Lion. In contrast to Apple’s solution, it’s much better because it creates a hard copy of Lion which you can boot your Mac from.

Download Lion Disk Maker.