Lion Hidden Partition

[Consultant]

With Lion creating new recovery / install partition, would that be one partition in addition to hidden partition or part of existing hidden partition?

 

[xgman]

If you look in disk utility under partition, you see the recovery partition and then the Lion one.

 

[freedevil]

I suppose then you can't choose which drive to have the recovery partition on. An external drive option would be nicer, if the primary hdd dies, the recovery partition is moot.

 

[Consultant]

If you look in disk utility under partition, you see the recovery partition and then the Lion one.

Thanks. I guess that means it's in addition to the hidden partition, because the hidden partition (used with bootcamp etc) is not visible in disk utility, at least in 10.4 to 10.6

I suppose then you can't choose which drive to have the recovery partition on. An external drive option would be nicer, if the primary hdd dies, the recovery partition is moot.

If you show packages of the lion installer, you can see disk image, which can be burn or restored to another drive.

 

[BlackMangoTree]

I suppose then you can't choose which drive to have the recovery partition on. An external drive option would be nicer, if the primary hdd dies, the recovery partition is moot.

I'm sure by now everyone knows to backup their HDD's. Externals are so cheap these days cloning your internal HDD is a non issue. If you have a failure no sweat it's backed up.

 

[Meyvn]

I'm sure by now everyone knows to backup their HDD's. Externals are so cheap these days cloning your internal HDD is a non issue. If you have a failure no sweat it's backed up.

I'm afraid this is not so. I teach Macs for a living and probably 1 out of 5 people backs up their drive. Maybe 3/5 has a flash drive with a few important documents on it, but not many actually do full drive backups.

 

[codymac]

I suppose then you can't choose which drive to have the recovery partition on. An external drive option would be nicer, if the primary hdd dies, the recovery partition is moot.

You can clone the Recovery HD partition off.

I made a dmg of mine (under DP3) and cloned it to a thumb drive which booted my 2011 MBP.

On boot, it threw up a modal about something. I don't recall it exactly, but it was something about not finding the OS install on the disk. I'd already wiped my DP3 partition from the internal and the thumbdrive didn't have an OS install on it.

Point being, it booted fine and gave me access to the Recovery HD as normal.

Not sure what use it would have, but I was curious if it was bootable independently of the primary OS install.

 

[baryon]

I'm sure by now everyone knows to backup their HDD's. Externals are so cheap these days cloning your internal HDD is a non issue. If you have a failure no sweat it's backed up.

That's irrelevant. If your internal HDD dies, how are going going to restore from your backup? You need to boot your computer to do that at least. To restore from Time Machine, you need an OS X install disk. Now that we can't have one, how are we supposed to proceed if our internal HDD fails? Buy a new HDD, yes, and then what?

I know there is a way to put the Lion installer (which includes the restore utilities such as the Time Machine restorer and Disk Utility) on a DVD or USB drive, but I think there should be a giant button somewhere that makes it easy for you.

Something like this should happen at some point:

"Do you want to create a recovery drive?" <Yes> <No>
"Please insert a DVD or USB drive and press OK"
"Done."

Maybe it could be an automatic prompt, or it could be a button in Disk Utility. It could just clone the restore partition onto the external media. Then you could boot even if your internal HDD fails, and you can transfer your files back onto a new HDD from backup while booted into recovery mode from the external media.