New MBP & Lion partition...

[jon08]

So I'm getting a new MBP next week, but I'm really confused right now about Lion. From what I understand these new MBPs come with Lion pre-installed on a separate little partition?

Am I eligible for a free Lion download from Mac App Store too? I would prefer to first erase the entire HDD, then do a fresh install of Lion from a USB/DVD, but to do that I assume I'd first need to install SL and then download it from Mac App Store and then make a boot disk on my USB?

In any case, I might be replacing the stock HDD with an SSD, which will also be my boot drive on MBP, so I'd like to install Lion on the SSD later on. In that case I'd need Lion on a USB or DVD to boot from it.....

So what's the deal really with these new MBPs?

 

[johnhurley]

So I'm getting a new MBP next week, but I'm really confused right now about Lion. From what I understand these new MBPs come with Lion pre-installed on a separate little partition?

Out of the box it has Lion as the only installed operating system in a big partition.

There will be a small hidden partition for recovery purposes. That partition lets you do things like check your disk ( disk utility ) and/or recover your system from a time machine backup and/or re-install your operating system.

Start by figuring out what your backup and recovery plan will be. Like for example plan on getting an external hard drive and start using that for time machine backups.

 

[jon08]

So if I wanted to erase the hidden partition and make a Lion boot drive on my USB key, how would I go about doing that?