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Mid 2011 MBA: Complete recovery

stu.h

stu.h

macrumors 65816
Original poster
May 8, 2010
1,386
582
West Midlands, England.
Afternoon
As I work in IT for a living, I like to have the tools ready and in place to do things like a reimage should the time arise.
I've only had this Air for a few weeks now, still finding my feet around MacOS having never used a Mac before (love it btw! :D )

Ive been reading around different places and it seems unclear to me how to go about reimaging this MBA from the ground up.
Earlier models had USB keys, this has a recovery partition (although only 1GB) some images dont apply to the machine, its all just a bit messy.

Can anyone tell me what I need to do or get to completely wipe this MBA should I need to and put back to the day I bought it?

Thanks in advance, I'll go keep reading in the meantime :confused:
 
Congratulations. t's much better asking for help before the problems actually appear. Everyone should know how to backup and restore their systems, and with Mac OS X it's really easy.

If you're using only Mac OS X, making regular backup copies using Time Machine is enough for a full recovery in case of a disaster.

To recover the system, you only need to start the Mac from the recovery partition pressing the option key while restarting and choosing the latest Time Machine backup as the source of the system.

You can use this also to reinstall the operating system in a different Mac, just begin the installation of the OS and when prompted, choose the latest Time Machine backup as the source and you'll have your new Mac exactly as your previous computer.

If you're using also Windows in a separate Bootcamp partition you'll need a separate strategy for it. As of version 2.3.3, WinClone is compatible with Mac OS X Lion and will image and restore your Bootcamp partition easily.

:):):)
 
Thanks for the reply, appreciated :D

Nah not using bootcamp, you dont buy a Mac to run Windows :confused:although I can see why people need to VM/Dual Boot tho..

Not saving any backups, I havent customised much and could get back to how I want it within a few minutes TBH.

I have a QNAP NAS which I was going to modify Lion to allow unsupported storage media, would this still allow me to use the NAS from boot as the modification is done to Lion itself?

Is it possible to reinstall without having any kind of backup?

:D
 
stu.h said:
Afternoon
As I work in IT for a living, I like to have the tools ready and in place to do things like a reimage should the time arise.
I've only had this Air for a few weeks now, still finding my feet around MacOS having never used a Mac before (love it btw! :D )

Ive been reading around different places and it seems unclear to me how to go about reimaging this MBA from the ground up.
Earlier models had USB keys, this has a recovery partition (although only 1GB) some images dont apply to the machine, its all just a bit messy.

Can anyone tell me what I need to do or get to completely wipe this MBA should I need to and put back to the day I bought it?

Thanks in advance, I'll go keep reading in the meantime :confused:
Click to expand...

Just got a 2011 11" MBA myself and have had a hell of a time so far but on the upside, I've learned how to restore it completely :p

As another person said, a time machine back up is your friend here. Unfortunately mine hosed before I was able to get it backed up and doing my 4th restore in one day :(

Some things I learned:

When your press CMD-R right after the boot sound, you go into the recover console. You can do various things in here like restore from a time machine backup, perform disk maintenance things and reinstall Lion completely.

Lion can only be reinstalled from over the Internet unless you have an image either on a USB thumb drive or a DVD and an external DVD drive. There are ways to make an install image from the Mac App store but it's too much to write it out here.

If you're having major issues, make sure to erase your disk before you reinstall or you will likely be left with the same issues. (trust me, pain in the ass and why I am having to restore again)

The best and easiest way is to keep it backed up via time machine and restore from that.
 
Mikey-Mike said:
How To Back Up OS X Installer for MacBook Air to a Flash Drive

Well if anyone is interested, I just backed up my Installer drive onto a SanDisk Extreme Class 10 Memory Card following this guys instructions and it worked like a charm. And I tested it by installing onto my Mac and it all worked.

The author also has instructions to make a boot Memory Card for Lion.
Click to expand...

My understanding is that the downloaded version of Lion doesn't work for MBA's. I figured I would put this to the test today so as soon as the app store app is downloaded this is basically what I was going to try.
 
This


If anyone's going to do this I suggest a 30MB/s SDHC card.

I tried using slower cards and they are a pain for booting a computer with but a fast card works fine.

Backed up my OS Install stick with one and made a boot utilities disk with another both work fine.
 
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This may be old school but i always create a partition for backup of music and whatever. Why dont you just put the installer on the created partition, and install off the partition. That way its plenty fast. I just dont see the need to have sd cards or usb's unless you are storing which is a good thing dont get me wrong. Just something i have always done.
 
stu.h,

Have read, Jane Austen: All works, C. S. Lewis: All Written Work.
Chaucer: As much as I was able,

G. S. England.


Edit some hours latter. Sorry, one to many drinks when I posted. Won't happen again :-]
 
Last edited:
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