Why can't I install lion recovery?

Try accessing the Recovery HD partition to see if it is actually on your system. At startup hold downn the Command+r keys and that should boot you to the Recovery HD. Or hold down the Option/Alt key at startup and that will give the Boot menu screen and select Recovery HD if it is on your system.

If it isn't then a reinstall Of Lion may be in order to recreate it.

Not sure if it's the FAT32 partition that did this to you.

See

OS X Lion: "Lion Recovery Update can't be installed on this disk. An error occurred while evaluating JavaScript for the package." when installing Lion Recovery Update

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4099

It sounds as if you don't have a functioning Recovery HD now, probably because of the altered partitioning. Is your Mac capable of Lion Internet Recovery without a Recovery HD? Some recent (2010?) Macs that originally shipped with Snow Leopard were offered an EFI firmware update for this.

If not, and if you don't want to erase and restore your internal HD, the other option in the linked support article was to install and keep a Recovery HD partition on a different volume than your internal HD:

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You can also use the OS X Lion installer from the Mac App Store to create an external bootable drive, complete with a Recovery HD partition. See this article for more details. This approach will, at least, create a bootable drive with Recovery HD which you can carry with you in case you need to use Internet Restore or make use of the other utilities Recovery HD provides.

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Once you have the Recovery HD as part of a new Lion installation on an external drive, you might be able to transfer just the Recovery HD from there onto a USB flash drive as described here:

OS X Lion: About Lion Recovery Disk Assistant

I don't know if all this is any better than the first option of reinstalling everything on the HD.

If you do have to recreate your Recovery HD and you are comfortable using Terminal commands, you can follow these instructions (Step 3) which will recreate the Recovery HD without having to reinstall the entire OS.

I've used these instructions a few times with 100% success on a system without Bootcamp. You only need the Lion Recovery Update file.

It's a nice article, but with regard to the presence of BootCamp, the comments section at the bottom includes this question and response

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In the current situation we are dealing not only with BootCamp, but with a FAT partition as well.

I'm looking for a way to create a USB recovery boot without the recovery partition on my hard drive. I'm not going to mess around with the Bootcamp partition as everything works just fine.

I'm sick of this infinite loop.

As I mentioned earlier, one way might be to re-download the Lion installer from the App store and use it to temporarily install Lion onto a spare partition on an external drive. This will also create a Recovery HD partition on that external drive, which could then serve as a source for Lion Recovery Disk Assistant. You would run that next, with a small USB drive as target. The result would hopefully be a bootable small USB flash drive containing the Recovery HD.

If you don't have an available partition on an external drive to use temporarily, you could buy a larger USB flash drive, re-partition it for the Mac as here, and install Lion directly onto it after downloading the installer from the App store. That should provide a Recovery HD partition on the USB drive as well. I don't know if an 8GB thumb drive would work for this; 16GB should be more than enough. An alternative use for a large USB flash drive would be to instead create a full Lion bootable installer on it, as described in this article.

Unless you have Lion Server try this:

sudo rm /System/Library/CoreServices/ServerVersion.plist

Hope it helps

Pietro

@Keg55

Hands down a brilliant solution, skip steps 2 and 3 in "Step 2" if you never had the recovery partition to begin with (it's simply attempting to wipe a corrupt recovery and merge the left over space)

All you need to do here is download the recovery file, after that it's literally copy and paste the terminal lines from the website in "step 3" .

Come on people, this is by far the easiest solution and can be done in 5 minutes flat without any external drive or usb stick. I would go as far as saying this is the fastest and safest solution, and it's not even on the mac help site.

Good work. Thank you!