



OS X Lion USB Thumb Drive doesn’t work with Macs that shipped with Lion-it’s designed for installing the OS on pre-Lion Macs.) The solutionįortunately, it’s possible to create a bootable Lion installer even if your only Mac is a newer model, although doing so requires a bit more work. Utility for creating an emergency Lion Recovery drive but, like the standard Lion Recovery feature, this drive requires you to download the full 4GB of Lion each time you want to install-it’s better to have the full installer on a bootable drive. In other words, you don’t have a downloadable version of the installer unless you happened to purchase Lion for another, older Mac.

But if you have a Mac that debuted after Lion (any Mac from July 2011 or later), your Mac shipped with Lion pre-installed. (Lion Internet Recovery is available on mid-2011-or-later Macs, as well as some older Macs that have receivedĮxplained how to create a bootable Lion-installer drive from the Mac App Store version of Lion. And if you’ve got a Mac that doesn’t support Lion Internet Recovery-a version of Lion Recovery based on special firmware-recovery mode may not even be available if your Mac’s drive itself is having problems, whereas a bootable install drive will always be there for you. For starters, Lion Recovery doesn’t include the full Lion installer-it requires you to download nearly 4GB of data before you can reinstall Lion-whereas a bootable installer drive contains the entire Lion installer, making installation much, much faster. For example, if you want to install Lion on multiple Macs, a bootable installer drive can be more convenient than downloading or copying the entire Lion installer to each computer.īut even for troubleshooting, a bootable installer drive has advantages over Lion Recovery. But as IĮxplained when Lion debuted, there are still good reasons to have a bootable installer disc or drive. It’s a convenient feature that, in theory, means you no longer have to carry a Mac OS X Install disc or a bootable external hard drive.
