What does Lion Recovery Disc do?

[geekygeek]

I downloaded a file from Apple called Lion Recovery Disc and I saved it to my 8 gig flash drive. What does it do? Does it reset your Air to factory settings? Apple has some requirements to download the disc though. Does my mid 2011 air meet these requirements?

 

[GGJstudios]

Lion Recovery Disk Assistant

System Requirements

• A Mac running OS X Lion with an existing Recovery HD
• An external USB hard drive or thumb drive with at least 1GB of free space

OS X Lion: About Lion Recovery

 

[geekygeek]

Lion Recovery Disk Assistant

OS X Lion: About Lion Recovery

didn't help me I just need to know if it restores my air to factory.

 

[jsolares]

didn't help me I just need to know if it restores my air to factory.

No, nothing that's available to the end user can restore it to factory, the restore partition and everything else will give you a clean install of Lion, but that is sans iLife which was installed from factory.

The Recovery Disk Assistant will make a bootable USB that's i think identical to your restore partition, and on the new machines you can get that back with CMD+R

Both will still need to download around 4GB from apple to reinstall Lion, i wonder if the 69$ usb stick they started selling works with the new machines.

 

[GGJstudios]

From the link I posted:

OS X Lion includes a new feature called Lion Recovery that includes all of the tools you need to reinstall Lion, repair your disk, and even restore from a Time Machine backup without the need for optical discs.

... but that is sans iLife which was installed from factory.

From the same link:

If you reinstall Lion on a new Mac that shipped with OS X Lion installed, on an erased or replaced hard drive, you can download iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand from the Mac App Store.

 

[jsolares]

From the link I posted:


From the same link:

Yes i know, but the USB doesn't reset it to factory settings, it gives you a clean install of Lion, you have to download iLife after already you already downloaded the 4GB of Lion which is something to take into account.