Need to make a recovery partition or key for my 13" MBPro Lion?

[phillytim]

Greetings!

I have a brand new (bought in August 2011) early 2011 13" MacBook Pro laptop that came pre-installed with Mac OS X LION, probably one of the first batches to have LION pre-installed.

I see all these posts and articles about creating a recovery partition or a USB Recovery key. Do I need to do any of that stuff???? It's my impression that my hard drive already has a recovery partition.

Do I need to do any of that stuff if I would swap out the hard drive for a larger model hard drive?

If so, would you please provide me with the right link for instructions.

Thanks for the insight!

 

[satcomer]

When you download Lion from the App Store once it was on you desktop is the time you could have made a USB2 Thumb Drive or DVD installer by follow the steps in the article How to make a bootable Lion install disc or drive.

To make a backup you need an external (that you connect to the fastest port on your Mac) and use a "clone" of your OS X (that you can boot into using System Preferences->Startup Disk) using either the free application Carbon Copy Cloner or the shareware SuperDuper.

It is really smart to have a bootable backup in case the hard drive does go south. This way one could still boot the Mac and try to repair the internal disk or decide to replace that disk. The best thing the clone could be cloned back to the new internal and you could pick up right where one left off before the old internal crashed.

Now the Lion Revcory is a hidden partition (when Mac is running Lion) the has /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility on it a Lion image to install again (for a messed up OS X Lion on the main startup drive. IMHO the problem with this if you drive goes south the hidden Lion Recovery will not work. So if any the steps in the Apple article Resolve startup issues and perform disk maintenance with Disk Utility and fsck then replace the drive.

 

[phillytim]

I never downloaded Lion from the Mac App store because, as I've mentioned, it was pre-installed on my MacBook Pro.

So I have not ever had access to the source file.

 

[waynep]

Greetings!

I have a brand new (bought in August 2011) early 2011 13" MacBook Pro laptop that came pre-installed with Mac OS X LION, probably one of the first batches to have LION pre-installed.

I see all these posts and articles about creating a recovery partition or a USB Recovery key. Do I need to do any of that stuff???? It's my impression that my hard drive already has a recovery partition.

Do I need to do any of that stuff if I would swap out the hard drive for a larger model hard drive?

If so, would you please provide me with the right link for instructions.

Thanks for the insight!

You should have a recovery partition on the drive. In the case of swapping out your drive, your 2011 MBP should have the Lion Recovery Feature built into your EFI. If you swap out drives, you should be able to connect to a network and download Lion.

Another option is the Lion Recovery Assistant. You can make a USB bootable thumb drive and boot from it also, and re-download/install Lion.

Also echoing satcomer above, Carbon Copy Cloner is a great tool for creating a bootable copy of your system on a USB drive.

 

[Weaselboy]

I never downloaded Lion from the Mac App store because, as I've mentioned, it was pre-installed on my MacBook Pro.

So I have not ever had access to the source file.

This hint shows how you can capture the DMG file to make a Lion USB key without using the App Store.