Recently I gave instructions on how to create a bootable Lion installer on a flash drive. I received a lot of follow-up emails from people who have purchased a new Mac that came with Lion and who don’t have the Lion installer to work with. For these folks, their machines don’t even come with restore discs; everything is done through the hidden Lion Recovery partition that’s on that drive. This is great for most things—you’d just hold down the Option key when booting and choose the Recovery partition if you needed access to the utilities or needed to reinstall your OS. The problem with having this hidden partition is that you lose it if your hard drive fails.
Apple does have a tool that hasn’t been widely publicized that will help you get around this. They have a Recovery Disk Assistant application that will help you create the Recovery partition on an external drive. The process will erase the external drive and create that hidden partition on that drive, and it will still be on your internal drive as well. Some things to consider in the process: you’ll lose around 1GB of storage on that external drive, and if your computer came with Lion, you’ll only be able to use the external Recovery drive with your computer. However, if you’ve upgraded your Mac to Lion, you can use your Recovery drive with any system that was upgraded to Lion. I do not believe you can use this to upgrade a machine, however, so you’ll still have to purchase Lion if you don’t already have it.
You can download the Recovery Disk Assistant from Apple’s Support site by clicking here.