I recently bought Lion for $29.99 for my iMac on the App Store, and now want to burn a disc so that I can make another white Macbook that has Snow Leopard dual boot to Lion as well (Apple allows installing Lion on more than one machine that a user owns). Also, I wanted to create a disc so that if there is an need in the future, there is a disc to boot to.
But I followed the instructions on
http://osxdaily.com/2011/06/08/create-burn-bootable-mac-os-x-lion-install-disc/
http://osxdaily.com/2011/07/08/make-a-bootable-mac-os-x-10-7-lion-installer-from-a-usb-flash-drive/
which are both linked from Can I dual boot Snow Leopard and Lion?
and the InstallESD.dmg file cannot be found. In fact, if I type dmg in the Finder's search box, and chose "Disc Image" (kind / type), the whole hard disk doesn't have a file that is more than 90MB in size. If I go to the Applications folder, the largest size shown is merely 495MB…
How can this be solved? thanks.
Best Answer
When you buy Lion from the App Store, it downloads an application named Install Mac OS X Lion to your Applications folder. InstallESD.dmg is hidden inside this application. Since it's hidden, a Spotlight search normally won't show it; you need to find the installer application, right-click on it, choose Show Package Contents, and then navigate to the image inside it (both links have instructions for this).
There is one more complication: when you run the Lion installer application, it installs Lion and then deletes the installer. But you can re-download it if you know the trick: open the App Store, Option-click on the Purchases icon in the toolbar, and you should have a Download button available for OS X Lion.