MacOS – How to create a Lion USB recovery stick without Mac OS

macosrecovery

I have a serious problem that I need help with.

Background

When I installed Lion, the install of a recovery partition failed. This is not good, since the offical Lion recovery disk assistant (http://support.apple.com/kb/dl1433) is only able to create a recovery USB with an existing Recovery HD on the mac.

My attempt to fix

There are many (inofficial) workarounds: Since they are all the same, I'm sure that you're familiar with it:

Open the package contents of the Lion installer from the Mac App store to get the InstallESD.dmg.
Restore the InstallESD.dmg onto the HFS+ formatted USB (GUID). I used a 8GB USB stick.

Source: create Lion install USB

This solution should be more convinient than the official soluion, since the Lion software would not have to be downloaded again.

What happened

The install USB booted fine. But the install failed. It could not even start. I got the message like: Install failed. Restart Installation.

But I did not restart immediately, since I wanted to format my whole SSD with the Disk Utiliy (which went fine). I formatted the SSD using the same Lion install USB. Having restarted the installation, I keep getting the same message! I've tried different partition layouts (always HFS+ with GUID):

only Macintosh HD partition
EFI and Macintosh HD partition
only Untiteled partition

I'm not able to install Lion! I do not have any install DVD (for any Mac OS). I only have the Lion Installer from the Mac App store with the InstallESD.dmgon a backup. Is there any way I can create a Lion Recovery Stick (with or without the dmg) on Windows or Ubuntu?

Best Answer

I've heard rumblings that the Lion Recovery Update will recreate the Recovery HD partition. Have not tested it myself: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1464 (For future reference, does little to help you now).

But to address your immediate problem, install Snow Leopard (using the discs that came with your Mac). Then once installed, log into the MAS and reinstall Lion.

Related Solutions

MacOS – How to create or recreate a Lion recovery partition

First, open a Terminal.

Status before:

$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
  #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
  0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *128.0 GB   disk0
  1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
  2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            127.8 GB   disk0s2

Get Lion Recovery Update v1.0 (431.91 MB)

Mount RecoveryHDUpdate.dmg

$ hdiutil attach ~/Downloads/RecoveryHDUpdate.dmg

Extract data from RecoveryHDUpdate.pkg

$ pkgutil --expand /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Lion\ Recovery\ HD\ Update/RecoveryHDUpdate.pkg ~/Desktop/RHD

Mount RecoveryHDMeta.dmg (in the RecoveryHDUpdate.pkg package)

$ hdiutil attach ~/Desktop/RHD/RecoveryHDUpdate.pkg/RecoveryHDMeta.dmg

Run tool that will finally resize current partition and create recovery

$ ~/Desktop/RHD/RecoveryHDUpdate.pkg/Scripts/Tools/dmtest ensureRecoveryPartition / /Volumes/Recovery\ HD\ Update/BaseSystem.dmg 0 0 /Volumes/Recovery\ HD\ Update/BaseSystem.chunklist
Creating recovery partition: finished

Status after:

$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
  #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
  0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *128.0 GB   disk0
  1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
  2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            127.2 GB   disk0s2
  3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3

MacOS – USB Lion Recovery Disk fails to boot

I have done this using the raw InstallESD.dmg image from the Mac App Store Lion installer (NOT the Recovery Disk Assistant) using the following steps:

Drag the InstallESD.dmg image to Disk Utility so that it appears on the side bar
Select your USB drive and partition the drive in to 2 or more GUID partitions
Once partitioning is complete, select the Restore tab
Drag that InstallESD.dmg image from the side bar to the source field
Drag the first partition from the USB drive on the side bar to the target field
Begin the restore process

Once finished you can leave things as they are or re-format the other partition as ExFAT or MS-DOS. However you should be aware the USB drive is GUID partitioned so only Windows 7 is likely to read it properly (I've never tried a GUID partioned USB drive on an XP system). You cannot use standard MBR partitions for the Lion Recovery Partition.