I have taken the same USB stick that worked earlier (and is working on tests with other computer) and hold option when launching to get choice of start up disk at launch….AND THE USB STICK WITH LION INSTALLER cannot be seen at boot choice screen at all! Thumb drive is clean, readable, etc. So i’m interested in doing a clean reinstall of LION ON TOP OF (or actually in place of) the poor performing Lion I have running now.
You will have external media to recover and reinstall Lion in the event of total drive failure or some other catastropheĪfter doing regular Lion install (on top of SL) my machine jst bogged and gave program errors, etc which is likely from years of formatting adding stuff, etc….but it is slogging though with Lion.The Lion USB key drive becomes a recovery disk with access to Disk Utility, re-installation, access Time Machine backups, and everything the Recovery HD partition does.You can perform a clean OS X Lion install with the USB drive.This process should work with a standard external USB hard drive too, but I have not tried that specifically.Īdvantages to making a bootable Lion USB drive: If you’re wondering about the other drives pictured, it’s because I am dual booting Lion and Snow Leopard, and “Recovery HD” is the small recovery partition that Lion installs on its own. Here’s what you’ll see upon booting with the drive connected:įrom here you can format, restore from backups, or reinstall Lion.
When this is finished, your bootable Mac OS X Lion installer drive is complete! You can now boot any Lion compatible Mac with the USB drive, just plug the USB key in, hold down Option during initial boot, and select the drive. Now you wait while the Lion DMG is restored to the USB drive, this can take a while and you’ll see a screen like this: Be sure you have the right things in the right places, you don’t want to format the wrong drive – then click on “Restore”.Drag the formatted USB key to the “Destination” and check “Erase destination”.
This is why we mounted the InstallESD.dmg file earlier, because we can just drag and drop the “Mac OS X Install ESD” image into the “Source” – if you didn’t mount the image, you can manually locate and select the image file yourself by clicking on “Image”
How to Create a Bootable Mac OS X Lion Installation USB Drive
Download Mac OS X Lion from the Mac App Store ($29.99).8GB+ USB flash key drive, these are cheap and ubiquitous on.A Mac with Mac OS X 10.6.8 so you can download and access Lion.This is pretty easy to do, but I have made the walkthrough as simple as possible with plenty of screenshots, so just follow along the instructions.