On Monday Apple released a new utility called the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant. The new utility is designed to help Mac users running Mac OS X Lion get up and running again if they encounter problems with their boot drive.
Although this is a step in the right direction it still doesn’t resolve the concerns people have about having the entire Mac OS X Lion operating system on media that you can reinstall it from.
The new utility was announced via this Apple knowledge base article https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1433 and according to Apple:
About Lion Recovery Disk Assistant
Built right into OS X Lion, Lion Recovery lets you repair disks or reinstall OS X Lion without the need for a physical disc.
The Lion Recovery Disk Assistant lets you create Lion Recovery on an external drive that has all of the same capabilities as the built-in Lion Recovery: reinstall Lion, repair the disk using Disk Utility, restore from a Time Machine backup, or browse the web with Safari.
Note: In order to create an external Lion Recovery using the Lion Recovery Assistant, the Mac must have an existing Recovery HD.
To create an external Lion Recovery, download the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant application. Insert an external drive, launch the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, select the drive where you would like to install, and follow the on screen instructions.
When the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant completes, the new partition will not be visible in the Finder or Disk Utility. To access Lion Recovery, reboot the computer while holding the Option key. Select Recovery HD from the Startup Manager.
For detailed information on this update, please visit: About Lion Recovery Disk Assistant.
If you want a copy of this new utility you can download a copy of it now.
