I’m finally getting around to upgrading my unibody MacBook to OS X 10.7 Lion (mostly because Apple is forcing my hand: I have to join iCloud before the end of this month, or face the consequences).
Since Lion is the first download-only OS upgrade from Apple, I’ve been strongly advised by my computer programming cohort that I really ought to make a bootable recovery OS X disk (actually a USB drive–the damn OS installer is +4Gb!) prior to running the install (just in case–and because making the boot disk *before* installing is *much* easier than trying to do it afterward, as OS X erases the installer disk image when it cleans up post-intallation).
Lots of great instructions cover doing this (here are the ones I followed: How to make a bootable Lion install disc or drive | Macworld); it isn’t really arduous, but it’s far from intuitive, so you’ll want the walk through.
I only discovered *after* purchasing a 8Gb ScanDisk Cruzer thumb drive to use as my bootable recovery disk–and wrestling with it for several hours as my Mac repeatedly failed to be able to finish writing the disk image to the drive–that, for reasons unknown, Cruzer thumb drives are notoriously janky in this application.
Thoroughly frustrated and hopelessly googline, I stumbled across the freeware Lion DiskMaker. It’s really just a shiny wrapper around a few AppleScripts, but it totally automates the process of creating one of these bootable thumb drives *and* can do so even with the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Cruzer thumb drives.
So, consider this lil bundle of magic *Recommended*:
Serial Serveur — Lion DiskMaker (US)
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