10.7: Create your own Recovery HD

Jul 25, '11 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: cycomachead

This hint shows how to create your own Recovery HD (Disc or Flash Drive).

Mac OS X Lion includes a hidden Recovery HD. This is a small partition about 650MB in size which you can boot from by pressing down Option at startup. It includes a variety of utilities which can help you troubleshoot a Mac.

It can be very handy to have a bootable copy of your own on some other media incase you need to troubleshoot a Mac with a bad drive, or something has happened to the recovery partition, unlikely but possible.

To do this we need to find and mount the hidden disk image with the Installer.

[crarko adds: I think it's always a good idea to have a different recovery device than a partition on the main boot drive.]

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