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Lion Recovery Disk Assistant error. Help needed.

J

J.C

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Nov 12, 2008
465
61
I'm trying to use the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant and I get the following error:

"The Recovery HD on this computer is damaged or not present. Recovery Disk Assistant requires a functioning Lion Receovery HD to create an external Lion Recovery"

I'm using a MacBook Air that came pre-installed with Lion, but has had the second/most-recent version of 10.7.2 applied, for use with iCloud + iOS 5. Would this be the issue?

I've properly formatted the USB drive as per the instructions.

Any help would be much appreciated.
 
It just occurred to me that I've restored from a Time Machine backup. Perhaps that kills the recovery partition?
 
I've read that some new Lion machines (not all) have a built-in recovery partition or something like that, which doesn't reside on the hard drive. That's what allows "internet restore" or whatever it's called to restore the system to a totally empty hard drive without the need of any external media. Maybe that's your case, and you don't need to create external media, and you don't have a recovery partition on your hard drive. But I'm really not sure about whether this is the case!
 
Since the current MacBook Air has this functionality built into it (Internet Recovery), isn't making a Lion Recovery Disk a moot point.
 
baryon said:
I've read that some new Lion machines (not all) have a built-in recovery partition or something like that, which doesn't reside on the hard drive. That's what allows "internet restore" or whatever it's called to restore the system to a totally empty hard drive without the need of any external media. Maybe that's your case, and you don't need to create external media, and you don't have a recovery partition on your hard drive. But I'm really not sure about whether this is the case!
Click to expand...

Very interesting! Any links?
 
DewGuy1999 said:
Since the current MacBook Air has this functionality built into it (Internet Recovery), isn't making a Lion Recovery Disk a moot point.
Click to expand...

So Internet recovery is the built-in recovery that baryon was referring to. I didn't realize that related only to specific (new) hardware. I have some reading to do.
 
mrapplegate said:
I think baryon just was speaking of the July 2011 MacBook Airs. If you can't use the recovery partition the machine defaults into internet recovery and downloads Lion from Apple. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718
Click to expand...

That's what confused me. The wording seems to imply that Internet recovery is an option for new machines (I have a 2011 MBA) if the Recovery HD isn't available, rather than just saying these machines don't have a Recovery HD. Maybe I'm just interpreting it badly and that does seem to be the case.
 
J.C said:
That's what confused me. The wording seems to imply that Internet recovery is an option for new machines (I have a 2011 MBA) if the Recovery HD isn't available, rather than just saying these machines don't have a Recovery HD. Maybe I'm just interpreting it badly and that does seem to be the case.
Click to expand...

Only the July 2011 MacBook Air and Mini have internet recovery. New machines in the future will feature it as well. The rest of us have to use the regular recovery partition.
 
J.C said:
That's what confused me. The wording seems to imply that Internet recovery is an option for new machines (I have a 2011 MBA) if the Recovery HD isn't available, rather than just saying these machines don't have a Recovery HD. Maybe I'm just interpreting it badly and that does seem to be the case.
Click to expand...

I believe that in addition to the Lion Internet Recovery that the MacBook Air and the Mac mini (mid-2011) also have a Restore Partition. The Lion Internet Recovery is used when the boot drive (along with the Restore Partition) is borked.

:apple: Apple - OS X Lion Recovery - Introducing Lion Recovery

This Macworld review of the mid-2011 Mac mini also mentions both.
 
Last edited:
local disk structure for Recovery Disk Assistant

In Terminal, run the following command. Please paste the result to this topic.

diskutil list
 
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *251.0 GB disk0
1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS MacBook Air HD 250.1 GB disk0s2
 
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