Bootable MacOSX 10.7 Lion emergency USB flash drive boot disk

Moderator Note: Split from the existing 10.6 Thread

Now that Lion is out, I guess we should find a way to make an emergency Disk on a thumb drive. And I'm not talking about a system install drive (there are plenty of guides out there for that). Besides apple sells a system install drive for $69.99 (outrageous) which I belive can be downloaded by torrents and installed on a pen drive.

I talk about a system emergency disk running Lion on which we can install all sorts of utilities like DiskWarrior, DriveGenius etc. Back-in-Time Utility would also be usefull on a disk like that. Finder will be able to run and the whole system would be running normally except the fact that it would be used for recovering data and maintenance operations.

I have a drive like that for Snow Leopard, but Lion should be able to make such a drive. When I try to install Lion from the Recovery HD, it reports that I am unable to install it on my disk. Why is that? Is it because the SL installation is on that drive? Do you know of any other way I could proceed make the emergency disk?

Mal said:

I've done that with both Leopard and Snow Leopard, so I can't imagine it'd be an issue.

jW

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one wouldn't imagine it would be an issue, no! however when you try to reinstall Lion from the recovery partition, you have to connect to the internet and the computer is checked for "eligibility" whatever that means. So after that, I get the dialog where I have to choose where to install Lion and my main drive is "locked" and it reports that By being "locked" I cannot install Lion there (WTF?) and my pen drive... well it reports that Lion cannot be installed there (doesn't say why). I assumed that because atm the pen drive holds a SL installation it might not be able to upgrade it due to space limitations but I do not want to erase my SL disk and afterwards find out I still can't install Lion!

Cave Man said:

Well, I had to make an 11 gb partition on a hard drive to install Lion. Once installed, it measured in at only 5.5 gb, so I don't know what the installer insisted on 11 gb. Anyway, I then used Carbon Copy Cloner to move it to an 8 gb USB2 drive (Kingston) and it did work. But it was unbearably slow to boot, click, move windows, launch apps - anything. No way will I be doing this. I'll take an external USB2 or FW drive over this thing. I'm sure there are faster thumb drives, but I suspect they'd be pretty pricy.

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Yes. I've invested a considerable ammount to get my super extra fast 16gb thumb drive specificaly for this reason. SL on it runs very well. Not fast as a hard drive but because it is a minimal installation I have no speed issues whatsoever. I believe Lion will run ok as well.