Recovery Partition vs USB Image Stick - Info Requested

[webster69]

I noticed that I did not get a USB drive\stick with the Lion image when I purchased my new MBA 2011. I heard it is now a recovery partition instead.

Can anyone confirm this and is there any risk of not having a USB image stick.

I am somewhat new to SSD so I am trying to analyze the risks. Obviously if it was a traditional hard drive and there was a complete failure a recovery partition is useless and we would need an external image source when replacing the hard drive. Is this the same for SSD??

Thanks for any info you would be able to provide.

 

[ZBoater]

I noticed that I did not get a USB drive\stick with the Lion image when I purchased my new MBA 2011. I heard it is now a recovery partition instead.

Can anyone confirm this and is there any risk of not having a USB image stick.

I am somewhat new to SSD so I am trying to analyze the risks. Obviously if it was a traditional hard drive and there was a complete failure a recovery partition is useless and we would need an external image source when replacing the hard drive. Is this the same for SSD??

Thanks for any info you would be able to provide.

I can confirm - no USB stick.

Yes, there is a risk, especially if you do like me and start messing around with the partitions on your hard drive with the Windows Disk Management utility. I hosed up the hard drive completely with no option to restore.

The idea of the recovery partition is that you can reinstall the OS on the main partition, but if the entire drive fails, you are out of luck. I imaged my new new MBA onto an external hard drive before the first boot, but I am not confident that image will restore properly. I wish there was a way to do a restore USB stick with Lion on it, but I have not figured out how to do one yet.

 

[Rigby]

The idea of the recovery partition is that you can reinstall the OS on the main partition, but if the entire drive fails, you are out of luck.

The new MBAs have the ability to boot the recovery system from Apple's servers over the Internet in case the recovery partition is corrupted (see knowledge base). So as long as you have a Wifi connection, it is still possible to reinstall. That said, I would also like to be able to create a bootable USB stick. But as far as I can tell, it is not possible to download the Lion installer from official sources using an MBA with pre-installed Lion.