Are you running Lion on a MacBook Air that shipped with a Snow Leopard restore drive? Would you like to turn that sexy Apple-emblazoned USB stick into something that will restore your slim laptop to the latest and shiniest version of OS X in a pinch?
Great news: it’s actually possible to rewrite the MacBook Air Software Reinstall USB Drive to restore Lion to your Macs, not Snow Leopard. And while it’s not for the faint-hearted, nor is it for the superhacker.
Josh Wright over at Macgasm figured out a really clever way to do just this very thing, using simply a copy of Lion, a MacBook Air Recovery USB Drive, a Windows machine (virtual or physical) and a few scripts.
One problem is that you’ll use the bundled copy of iLife, which is a bummer, but Josh says he’s working on a way to restore it. It looks like a great way to update the official Apple thumb drive to its latest and greatest.
Don’t have a MacBook Air USB Install Disk? Don’t sweat it. They’re pretty easy to find on eBay to perform this very trick.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
