No Lion Operating System Disk(s) with my new MacBook Pro?

This is normal with Lion.

Lion is not available on DVD.

There is a recovery partition on the hard drive that is reachable by booting with the command and R keys depressed.

Allan

A this time you don't. Apple is moving away from physical media, for better or worse.

There won't be any DVDs but Apple announced they will release Lion on a USB thumb drive sometime this month for $69. You can also install a recovery partition on an external drive following these directions.

OS X Lion: About Lion Recovery Disk Assistant

So.... going down the Micro$oft OEM path. No physical OS!!!!

All well and good BUT.... if your disk screws up????

I've been in this game for over thirty years - Always carried recovery media - needed it many times.

Your solution?????

SHEESH!!!!

Hi luke: Yes I know how you feel. I felt thesame way when those forst imacs came out with no floppy disk drives and with a read-only optical one. But now you can't find floppies anywhere xo life goes on.

In any case you can, at least, make your own recovery disk. I did it and it works just fine. Here's a set of directions that I followed that I copied from some poster (sorry but I lost the originator so can't give him credit).

•. Purchase and download Lion from the Mac App Store on any Lion compatible Mac running Snow Leopard.

•. Right click on “Mac OS X Lion” installer and choose the option to “Show Package Contents.”

•. Inside the Contents folder that appears you will find a SharedSupport folder and inside the SharedSupport folder you will find the “InstallESD.dmg.” This is the Lion boot disc image we have all been waiting for.

•. Copy “InstallESD.dmg” to another folder like the Desktop.

•. Launch Disk Utility and click the burn button.

•. Select the copied “InstallESD.dmg” as the image to burn, insert a standard sized 4.7 GB DVD, and wait for your new Lion Boot Disc to come out toasty hot.

It is important that you burn your Lion boot disc or backup the Lion installer prior to installing Lion itself. If left in the Applications folder the installer will be removed after the Lion installation is completed. If you are reading this article after upgrading to Lion all is not lost. A fresh copy of the Lion installer can always be redownloaded from the Mac App Store by clicking on the Purchased tab with the Option key held down.

With the Lion boot disc you can boot any Lion compatible Mac, and install 10.7 just like you installed previous versions of Mac OS X. You can even use Disk Utility's Restore function to image your Lion boot disc image onto a external drive suitable for performing a clean install on a optical-drive-less MacBook Air, or Mac mini. Clean installs with Lion are easy once you find where Apple has hidden the boot disk.

Hope this is useful to you.

Rick

To create bootable media:

• get yourself Carbon Copy Cloner or other software to create a bootable clone
• Clone your fresh Lion Install to an external USB-disk, preferably while the Lion installer is still sitting on the desktop.

Thus you will always be able to boot from the original installation or make a clean install of Lion.

Hi Richard

I think you're missing the point. I just paid no small amount of money for a top-of-the-line MBP 17" only to find no recovery media. Yes, you can create bootable media, yes, you can create USB disks (I shoe-horned SL onto an EMAC!) but why should I have to _buy_ Lion from the app store!!!

Suffice to say I have my recovery media, but I know what I'm doing.

For the average Joe, a hard disk error (lost boot partition perchance) is catastrophic, all for the sake of Apple saving 79c for media.

Sorry but I disagree, given Apple's position in the market, I think this is pathetic.

You don't need to buy Lion if your mac came equipped with it. You can use the Lion Recovery Assistant to create a bootable USB (HDD or flash), with very little fuss. Every user should be using Time Machine to back up their data to an external HDD anyway, so it's easy to use this to create an emergency boot disk.

The Lion Recovery Assistant needs a good internet connection when recovering because it downloads GB of data from Apple servers. What about people like my aunt that are still on dialup? These people need a local media recovery solution as an option. Cloud computing is wonderful, but not giving users an option to create local recovery media is short sighted and causes a great deal of frustration for those of us that must work around these limitations.

Time Machine is great, but it does not restore the Mac to the factory fresh settings because you can't run it before you've booted the Mac and run through the setup app the first time.

And we shouldn't be forced to spend more to BUY recovery media. Just give us the option to burn recovery DVDs or USB media.

You CAN create a Boot disc or buy a Tthumbdrive with lion installed if you want.

Just google it.

The only links I can find are for creating a boot disc from the app store download of Lion. This is a new MacBook Pro which has Lion already installed from the factory.

I do not think we should not be forced to purchase a thumbdrive with Lion installed. Apple, where is my option to create my own recovery DVD or USB media that does not rely on the internet???

AH! My point exactly!

As I said before, for the want of 79c media, users are forced to run around like chooks with their heads cut off.

Shame, Apple, SHAME.

Looks like there may be a solution. A bit of work. Haven't tested it yet.

http://www.afp548.com/article.php