To test if you have a Lion recovery partition, Just hold down Command-R during startup and Lion will give you the option of going into recovery mode if the recovery partition is there. It involves downloading a program from apple called ‘Lion Recovery Disk Assistant’ It will not be a fill installer but it will use the internet to install Lion onto another computer. If your Macintosh has an existing Lion Recovery partition (this will be the case if Lion came pre-installed on your machine when you purchased your computer from Apple), you can use this method. What you get: A USB stick you can repair your Lion installation from, but not run Lion from. You’ll only need a 4G USB Drive for this option. Now option-click on ‘purchases’ and ‘installed’ will change to ‘install’ so that you can re-download the installer.įormat your Thumbdrive using a GUID Partition Table, and ‘ Mac OS Extended (Journaled)’, then you can run the Lion installer and install Lion onto the thumb drive. If you have already installed it and it has deleted itself, go back into the App store and click on ‘purchases’ and next to Lion it will say ‘Installed’. DO NOT INSTALL IT ONTO YOUR COMPUTER OR THE INSTALLER WILL DELETE ITSELF. What you get: A USB stick you can boot off and repair your Lion installation from.ĭownload the Lion installer from Apple App Store. What you need: an 8G thumb drive and OS X Lion from the App Store. Option 1: Put a full bootable Lion installation on the USB Drive with a recovery partition. If you buy and install Lion from the App Store it downloads all 3Gigabytes from the App Store, installs Lion, then deletes the installer! So when you go to install it on another machine it needs another 3Gigabyte download! Here’s how to make a re-usable installer.

Here are three different ways to put Lion on a USB thumb drive.

Lion bootable usb