Put Lion "Recovery HD" on USB

Solution 1:

The best answer is one supported by Apple.

Why not use the new Lion Recovery Disk Assistant to make your USB bootable media.

The only requirements are listed as:

• A Mac running OS X Lion with an existing Recovery HD
• An external USB hard drive or thumb drive with at least 1GB of free space

Detailed, step by step instructions are updated at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4848

Solution 2:

Luckily I've done this as a proof of concept. The key is to use the terminal for it. Apple hides the recovery partition by default in Disk Utility which makes it hard to clone. Fire up your terminal and let's get started.

Type diskutil list and find the partition name for Recovery_HD, it should be something like disk0s3

What we're going to do with this is create a disk image with dd and then we can use disk utility to restore it to the usb drive.

Type dd if=/dev/disk0sX of=/Users/USERNAMEHERE/Desktop This creates a disk image copy of the recovery partition in a disk image on your desktop. Note, X is the number that you found from diskutil list

Let dd run and the once you get your prompt back, you can quit terminal.

Open up Disk Utility and find the USB drive you want to clone to. Make sure that you have everything off the drive.

Click on the 'Restore' Tab. Drag your newly created disk image into the Source box, and do the same with your drive into the destination box.

click restore and let it run.

Once it's finished you should be able to boot from this drive, in theory. I would like to note that I had an issue using this drive on a computer that had SL installed, which I find to be a bit odd but YMMV