Install Lion without recovery partition?

Did you boot from that external and try to install on the internal? I imagine that is what was intended in the instructions you found.

What I got from that was install on the external. Then install on the internal, all while booted on your internal. Once the recover partition is created on the external, it will install on the internal without adding the recovery partition.

This has to be the worst frickin upgrade in Apple's history. They essentially force you to go out and get an external drive. This makes no sense. It should be up to the user to install without the recovery drive.

I have Bootcamp installed with Windows 7 Professional on this partition. I have a MacBook Pro 13" with the 250 Gb HD. It was partitioned equally last year in June, 116 Gb on Bootcamp & 115 Gb on Mac HD.

I upgraded my Snow Leopard OS to 10.6.8 and also, installed the migration update last night. This morning, I downloaded and install Lion from the App Store without any issues. The Lion installation created the Recovery HD.

I have read on this forum about individuals having issues with HP OfficeJet 4500 printers and Office 2011, but I haven't experienced any of these application problems.

They didn't force me to get an external. It installed the recovery partition just fine on my Bootcamped Mac.

I am having the same issue. Tried 5 times already.

I have a method that has worked for me to get Lion Installed. BUT it has one big caveat, which will be about the restore.

1) In Mac Snow Leopard use WinClone to make a copy of my bootcamp partition; saved to a HFS+ device

2) Disk Utility >> Delete Windows Partition

3) DiskUtility >> Extend the Mac partition

4) Run the Lion Installer from the Mac Store Download

LATER, and this is the caveat bit, I aim to do the following:

5) Run Boot Camp Assistant to add back a Windows partition

6) Add back my WinClone backup up to that.

I'm now on Lion and it's runinng fine. I see that running Winclone throws an error that it's not Leopard of Snow Leopard and wants to quit. So either I need to wait for this to be updated or I might just boot off a cloned Mac Disc (Clone Carbon Copy) of 10.6.* and run windclone from there.

So I've got there to Lion, I haven't yet got back to my Windows partition being back where it should yet. But it's a start.

I had the boot camp repaired by reinstalling the drivers. Just boot windows and browse with the explorer through the OSX 10.6 install disk to install the drivers, then select repair. Reboot windows ones to complete the repair.

After this I could fully install Lion.

Similar problem installed lion and wound up with the white bootscreen for hours. Think I may have fixed it though. Due to having multiple macs in the house I had created a bootable DVD with disc utility prior to installation and rebooted the computer to the DVD. Reinstalled Lion from the created disc. It seemed to reboot just fine from that point. I went back into the boot DVD and performed permission and disk repair from there. Restarted MBP again with no issue. Checked for additional updates then decided to check the windows partion and it booted just fine .

So far so good on the MBP with both partitions. I want to give it a couple days before I move to lion on the other computers. Thankfully I didn't have to erase the windows partition to make it work. I think the bootcamped partitions confuse the installer when it creates the recovery partition. I suspect I will never use the recovery partition and will just use the DVD instead.

So, after trying a ton of different combinations between 3 different computers, here's what I finally ended up doing...

I have a laptop with a bootcamp partition, Windows XP, formatted in NTSF, so Lion can't create a boot partition (this is a HUGE oversight on Apple's part!!!). So I cloned the OS X part of the drive to an external, installed Lion onto the external, and now I'm currently cloning the Lion part of the drive back to the laptop. The external was bootable, so I'm hoping that this actually works, without creating a recovery drive on my laptop.

I also have a Mac Pro with an SSD, so I REALLY don't want to create a recovery partition on that. Might have to try the same thing eventually, if this works.

I had a pain trying to install to a MBP with a VM Fusion/bootcamp partition. It would not install. I cleaned an old external drive, installed Lion, booted into it, then installed. I lost the VM Fusion capability but bootcamp works like a champ. I did no archive. I am tired of waiting around for software installs. It all works. While I get the idea of a rescue partition, I am also annoyed with the lack og forethought in making sure the upgrade worked well.

Snow Leopard was a breeze in comparison. I am not sure what I will do with the VM Fusion not starting up.

I have a Snow Leapord + Boot Camp install. I am unable to get Lion installed due to there already being 4 partitions on the drive. The installer throws an error indicating that a change to the partition table will cause Windows to not be bootable. The web page referred to in the error message seems to indicate that an install without a recovery HD is possible, however there is no documentation on how to accomplish this.

I have also attempted installing Lion to an external drive, then launching the installer from that drive. I had no success with this approach either.

This is extremely frustrating. Its been said before, the recovery partition is a great idea, but the installer seems to be very lacking when it comes to opting out of this feature.

messedup wrote:

The web page referred to in the error message seems to indicate that an install without a recovery HD is possible, however there is no documentation on how to accomplish this.

I have also attempted installing Lion to an external drive, then launching the installer from that drive. I had no success with this approach either.

That documentation is there where you found out how to install on an external. However, you don't boot into the external. Just run the installer on the original drive with the external connected. It should find the Recovery partition on the external and complete the process.

You might want to copy the installer onto another drive or burn to a DVD so that you can copy it back to the internal drive after the install.

Also note that it says it may not create a Recovery partition. Seems that this may fail, also.

I haven't attempted this, so I can't offer any hints other than what I gleaned from reading the article.