how to create a recovery partition mac os x lion

It works much the same way as Apple's too, launch the app and follow the prompts and you end up with a USB drive you can boot from. This was the nicest option before Apple built a utility of its own. This is a nice wrapper for a set of Applescripts that will also create a USB drive to back up from. After a little while you will have a bootable backup of your OS.Īn alternate method that dates back to the release of Lion is Disk Maker X, formerly known as Lion Disk Maker. Using this method is pretty straightforward: download the Recovery Disk Assistant, plug in that USB drive, and follow the prompts. This works with Lion, Mountain Lion, and Mavericks, all the versions of Mac OS that were distributed via the Mac App Store. There are a couple of methods for doing this, which both lead to the same place: A USB drive (8GB or larger), safely stashed in a drawer, which has a bootable OS on it, as well as an installer to put that OS on a hard drive.įirst up is the 'official' method, a utility introduced with Mavericks, called Recovery Disk Assistant.

This new feature is called Recovery, and it gives you a way to start 'from scratch' if you need to rebuild your Mac. You’ll also need access to a Mac running Yosemite that includes an existing Recovery HD partition.Beginning in Lion (10.7), there's a new feature in Mac OS X to assist you if things go really wrong, since you can't boot from disk anymore. To create a recovery disk, you need a USB flash drive or an external hard drive that has at least 1GB free space. The simplest solution is to put an external USB drive or SD card into service using the OS X Recovery Disk Assistant. However, if your Mac is not online, or if you’ve upgraded an older Mac to Yosemite, that method won’t work. This recovery system is stored on a hidden partition on your Mac’s hard drive - but what if something happens to your hard drive? Well, if your Mac can’t find the recovery partition but it’s connected to the Internet via either Wi-Fi or a network cable, it’ll start the OS X Internet Recovery Feature. Start your Mac and hold Command + R to go into recovery mode, from which you can start Disk Utilities, restore from a Time Machine backup, or perform a clean install.

OS X 10.7 Lion did away with recovery disks, and these days, Apple provides a built-in recovery system within Yosemite.

How to create a recovery partition mac os x lion