Recovery HD (Mac) vs Recovery Disk (thumb drive)?
What is the difference between the Recovery Disk on the thumb drive and the Recovery HD on the Mac? In what situations would you use each one?
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
What is the difference between the Recovery Disk on the thumb drive and the Recovery HD on the Mac? In what situations would you use each one?
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
They are the same because the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant installs on the flash drive what is installed on the computer. If there were no Recovery HD on the computer, then the assistant will produce an error.
They are the same because the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant installs on the flash drive what is installed on the computer. If there were no Recovery HD on the computer, then the assistant will produce an error.
So there is no difference? so basically, the disk assistant installs the recovery HD on your thumb drive in case something happens with the one on the computer?
That's correct. The assistant does not contain a canned Recovery HD to install. It uses the one already installed on your computer. It helps to test the flash drive you made just in case so you know it will work.
Three questions now:
1) How do you test your hard drive, and
2)When you might boot with disk utility (option key at startup), it will normally give you an option of Mactintosh HD, Recovery HD, and the USB thumb drive (if you have made one and inserted it into the computer). In that scenario, would you boot from the Recovery HD or the flash drive that you had made since they are basically the same? and
3) Is pressing the option key at startup and booting to the Recovery HD the same as pressing Command-R on your keyboard? Do they achieve the same purpose?
On the computer itself:
Boot to the Recovery HD:
Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.
Using the USB flash drive:
EDIT:
As Baltwo has suggested you can make a fully bootable Lion installer:
Make Your Own Lion Installer
1. After downloading Lion you must first save the Install Mac OS X Lion application. After Lion downloads DO NOT click on the Install button. Go to your Applications folder and make a copy of the Lion installer. Move the copy into your Downloads folder. Now you can click on the Install button. You must do this because the installer deletes itself automatically when it finishes installing Lion.
2. Get a USB flash drive that is at least 8 GBs. Prep this flash drive as follows:
3. Locate the saved Lion installer in your Downloads folder. CTRL- or RIGHT-click on the installer and select Show Package Contents from the contextual menu. Double-click on the Contents folder to open it. Double-click on the SharedSupport folder. In this folder you will see a disc image named InstallESD.dmg.
4. Plug in your freshly prepared USB flash drive. You are going to clone the InstallESD.dmg disc image to the flash drive as follows:
When the clone is completed you have a fully bootable Lion installer that you can use without having to re-download Lion.
The catch here is you must have a copy of the Lion installer application. If you downloaded Lion from the App Store and installed it, then it was automatically deleted after the installation. That means you need to sign into the App Store while running Snow Leopard to redownload Lion for free.
If your computer came with Lion pre-installed then there is no obvious way to get the installer application needed. This will necessitate using the methods outlined in Downloading Hardware Specific Lion Installers to obtain the installer.
Some clarifications. If you follow the steps in http://www.macworld.com/article/161069/2011/07/make_a_bootable_lion_installer.ht ml. you'll end up with a bootable Lion install disk. The Recovery HD doesn't contain the Lion installer, while the one made this way does, except for some additional components. The key is using the InstallESD disk image to make the bootable disk. The Recovery HD, while bootable, needs to download the 3.6 GB installer app from the MAS, whereas the bootable disk you make contains the installer, saving bandwidth, time, and electricity. I don't use slow USB drives, preferring to restore the InstallESD image to 10 GB volumes on my HDs. That way, restoring only wastes about three minutes checking for the additional components.
I'm saying, when you option click, you should be shown the "Macintosh HD", the "Recovery HD', and the USB thumb drive. If you had the "Recovery HD" also installed on the thumb drive, would there be any difference between using the "Recovery HD" that showed up as a partition/disk, or using the thumb drive?
No, there would be no difference.
Just one more question: Why would it be necessary to install the Lion Recovery on your thumb drive if it is all ready on the computer?
MrWinBy5 wrote:
Just one more question: Why would it be necessary to install the Lion Recovery on your thumb drive if it is all ready on the computer?
There could be situation where the internal drive could have problems.
Booting to the thumb drive and running disk utility can help troubleshoot.
Also, something can just corrupt the internal drive preventing it from
booting requiring you to boot to the thumb drive and do a complete
format of the internal and reinstall.
Would you boot to the thumb drive by pressing "Command-R" or by pressing "option" at starrtup?
And also, I tried to make a backup of Lion on a thumb drive. I formatted it all correctly and stuff but it gave me an error "cannot restore: not enought allocated memory" or something like that. Did I do something wrong?
You would use OPTION boot:
Boot Using OPTION key:
I've got the thumb drive formatted and am ready to put a Lion installer on it, but all the descriptions begin AFTER one has downloaded the "Install OSX Lion" from the App store. I can only find Mountain Lion on the App store, and I do, actually, already have Lion on this very computer.
Why do I have to download anything? But if I do, where do I find what I need.
(MBP Retina, OSX 10.7.5)
Recovery HD (Mac) vs Recovery Disk (thumb drive)?