2011 Air's partitioning: what's stored in the smaller partition?

[macsymacker]

hello,

today in an attempt to discover how to restore or reinstall lion, I booted with command+r.

I see that there are two disks. one (main) with larger capacity of 121 odd gbs and the other with 1.3 gb or so.

if I ever decide to reinstall lion from scratch and have the machine reset to default (all deleted and gone, brand new like the first time it came out of the box);

will it install from that small drive? or will it download the huge 6 gb lion over the internet and then install?

thank you for anyone who shares their experience on the subject.
cheers!

 

[MiniMi]

That is the restore partition that you would use to restore your MacBook Air

 

[macsymacker]

thanks!

in what case download from apple servers becomes necessary?

and how come the download file is 6+ gbs whilst the restore partition is 1/4 of it?

That is the restore partition that you would use to restore your MacBook Air

 

[theSeb]

thanks!

in what case download from apple servers becomes necessary?

and how come the download file is 6+ gbs whilst the restore partition is 1/4 of it?

The restore partition is there to get you started on restoring your computer, but it will still download the remaining 6 GBs when you need to reinstall Lion.