that this applies to those who upgraded to Lion and got the installer. What about those who got new machines with Lion and no disks (I am one of them)? Can the recovery partition be used to create a bootable disk?
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that this applies to those who upgraded to Lion and got the installer. What about those who got new machines with Lion and no disks (I am one of them)? Can the recovery partition be used to create a bootable disk?
Your question makes me think something is going bad now.
Bob
They have released a Lion disk recovery assistant tool allowing one to create on an external drive a copy of the recovery partition from a Mac with Lion installed. The caveat of downloading the actual installer using that external recovery partition is still there, as I understand because it seems to be a clone of the recovery partition on the main HD.
From what I've been told, and this is from Apple's provider support people, so a level or two above what the average person has access too, the answer is no.
You can buy a dongle off Apple, but that basically just helps if you have a corrupted restore partition, or maybe you had to replace the HDD. It doesn't contain the full OS, and IIRC, it only works on the Mid-2011 models which shipped with Lion. You still have to download the OS image and install it.
AASPs can buy a different dongle which will install the entire OS without the Internet, BUT from what I'm told it's a one shot deal. The installer will lock itself to a given unit. That might be a viable solution for individual customers, but it's completely useless if you're dealing with multiple units.