Just right click that icon and choose “Show in Finder.” From there, right click the icon and choose “Show Package Contents.” Inside the installation package you’ll find an “InstallESD.dmg” disk image. When you purchase Lion, it places an “Install Lion” icon in your dock. The good news is there is a workaround, and a fairly easy one at that. Thirdly, if your hard drive actually fails, so will your recovery partition, leaving you stranded. Apple is now presumably tracking who has Lion on their Apple account, and denying you access if you haven’t paid for it on that account.

Second, this marks the first time Apple is doing device activations on Macs. First, if you don’t have a very fast Internet connection available, you’re basically screwed. If you click OK, Lion then attempts to connect to Apple and download all 4+ GB of Lion from Apple’s servers. If you opt to do a re-install, Lion warns you that your Mac’s serial number will be sent to Apple. The recovery partition only contains a very limited base system that lets you use Safari to get help online, use Disk Utility, or do perform re-install.

Apple has done a few weird things with Lion to make it a “cloud” friendly OS, and some of them are not necessarily good things.įirstly, Lion isn’t really there. This is where things get interesting (read: sticky). You simply mouse or arrow-key over to that partition and press return, which boots you into recovery mode. This brings up a list of partitions available for you to boot from, one of which is the new “Mac OS X Recovery” partition created by Lion when it’s originally installed. To recover a Lion installation, and do a clean install or reinstall, you simply reboot while holding the option key.

How will normal people install to a bare drive?.

Macbook pro os x lion install disk