What does Lion Recovery Disc do?

Lion Recovery Disk Assistant

System Requirements

• A Mac running OS X Lion with an existing Recovery HD
• An external USB hard drive or thumb drive with at least 1GB of free space

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OS X Lion: About Lion Recovery

geekygeek said:

didn't help me I just need to know if it restores my air to factory.

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No, nothing that's available to the end user can restore it to factory, the restore partition and everything else will give you a clean install of Lion, but that is sans iLife which was installed from factory.

The Recovery Disk Assistant will make a bootable USB that's i think identical to your restore partition, and on the new machines you can get that back with CMD+R

Both will still need to download around 4GB from apple to reinstall Lion, i wonder if the 69$ usb stick they started selling works with the new machines.

From the link I posted:

OS X Lion includes a new feature called Lion Recovery that includes all of the tools you need to reinstall Lion, repair your disk, and even restore from a Time Machine backup without the need for optical discs.

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jsolares said:

... but that is sans iLife which was installed from factory.

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From the same link:

If you reinstall Lion on a new Mac that shipped with OS X Lion installed, on an erased or replaced hard drive, you can download iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand from the Mac App Store.

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GGJstudios said:

From the link I posted:


From the same link:

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Yes i know, but the USB doesn't reset it to factory settings, it gives you a clean install of Lion, you have to download iLife after already you already downloaded the 4GB of Lion which is something to take into account.