10.7: A solution for MacBook Air and Mac mini lack of install media

Oct 17, '11 02:18:00AM

Contributed by: Ben Levy

I'm not happy with not having restore media and I'm not patient enough to wait for a 3.5 GB download, so I sought another solution.

The new MacBook Air and Mac mini use a build of 10.7 different from the regular installer from the App Store. If the hard drive is replaced or wiped it's necessary to download the installer from Apple's servers using Lion Recovery from either the Restore Partition or using Lion Internet Recovery.

Firewire or Thunderbolt Target Disk Mode (T key at boot) makes creating a copy of the contents of the drive using another machine an easy matter, but what about the Recovery Partition? For that, first enable the DeBug Menu in Disk Utility on your second machine. Once that has been enabled choose the 'Show every partition' option and the Recovery Partition is visible and the contents can be copied.

At this point it's possible to restore the image that originally came with the MB Air, but if it's a new or wiped drive the restore would lack the Recovery Partition. Adding the recovery partition needs to be done at the command line because Disk Utility at the GUI won't permit creating a partition as small as the Recovery Partition, nor will it hide the partition properly.

The process is fairly clear; reduce the size of the main partition, create the Recovery Partition, then because diskutil is a little confused, correct the size, copy the contents of the Recovery Partition and then designate the type of partition.

Detailed instructions (Use 10.7.x for all of this):

The source for much of this hint is here though it's modified it for ease and a better understanding of what takes place.

[crarko adds: I haven't tested this one.]

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