Cannot install Lion on External Hard Drive

I have a brand new ssd in a hard drive enclosure and want to put lion on it before I install it into the computer, taking out the old hard drive (with SL on it). I got it from the app store, it installs until it has to restart, and then after it restarts and is installing is says cannot install because it cant create a recovery partition or something like that. How can I do this? Do I need to install the empty ssd, then have lion on a bootable usb and install from there? Thanks in advance.