Apple releases Lion Recovery Disk Assistant tool
Apple has released a tool that allows you to create a Lion recovery drive in similar ways to the current drive.
One of the hot topics regarding OS X Lion has been the lack of a physical installation drive that be used in troubleshooting problems and to recover or reinstall the operating system. We have reported extensively on this and the options for handling it, which have included mirroring the Lion recovery partition on an external drive, and creating your own Lion installation disk from the Lion installer that you download from the Mac App Store.
Apple has apparently taken people's concerns to heart, and has released a Lion Recovery Disk Assistant tool that you can use to create your own portable recovery disk, either on a USB flash drive or as a separate partition on any USB or FireWire hard drive (more information on the tool, including instructions, can be found here).
While this tool is convenient, it does not provide any new recovery options beyond what we have already discussed about creating your own Lion recovery partition. The tool requires an existing Recovery HD partition on the Mac that is creating it, and works by creating a block-level clone of the partition to your designated drive. Therefore, if you have already created a recovery partition for yourself, either from the Recovery HD partition or better yet from the Lion installer application, then you do not need to use this utility.
If you cannot create a recovery disk because your system does not have a Recovery HD partition, then you can download the Lion installer to create an installation drive from it, or wait, since, as we reported earlier, Apple may be gearing up to offer recovery drives to people who cannot make them themselves.
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