Dan Mitchell1 wrote:
Re: if the whole disk fails you can't boot from anything and need external media to boot from to deal with it.
Surely this can be solved by using software like "SuperDuper" to create, on a regular basis, an image of your entire Lion system on to an external HDD, which can then be used to restore your system after a catastrophic internal HDD failure ?
Or having an external Time Machine HDD ?
Cloning software like Carbon Copy Cloner and Superdupes! needs to be updated for OS X 10.7 Lion as there is a OS X recovery partition to also clone.
It should work just like before, but of course Apple isn't going to endorse this method EVER!
It's possible to burn a ISO/dmg of Lion using the MAS Lion installer, instructions here (credit to Kappy for catching this one):
http://eggfreckles.net/tech/burning-a-lion-boot-disc/
Again Apple likely isn't going to push this out to the masses neither.
I don't advise anyone to upgrade to Lion until several months down the road, until third party software is updated, drivers fixed, bugs worked out etc.
If Apple doesn't provide a bootable disk of Lion, some enterprising third party developer will simply take the present OS X Lion installed and make a bootable ISO of it.
It's done on Linux, so it can be done on OS X. The problem of course is doing it before trouble strikes which a lot of people won't do, just like they don't backup or clone.