MacOS – Is it possible to configure (or trick) internet recovery to load Lion instead of Mountain Lion

internet-recoverymacos

I have two machines this week that I needed to install Lion on and both were shipped with Lion and subsequently upgraded to Mountain Lion.

I tried wiping the drives, but Internet Recovery only offers a choice to download and install Mountain Lion. Is there a way to get Lion reinstalled instead?

I tried running the Install Mac OS X Lion app that I saved when I was using it to upgrade several Snow Leopard Macs to Lion last summer – but Apple has built in a check to prevent me from installing Lion onto an external drive while my mac currently runs Mountain Lion.

Can't install Lion from an Mountain Lion Mac

Is there an elegant way to instal Lion without needing a bootable Lion system to re-run the Lion installer (or download it from Internet Recovery)?

Best Answer

Yes - you can download the OS X Recovery Disk Assistant v1.0 and write a Lion specific Recovery HD to an USB drive with 1 GB of space on it. This will erase whatever information is on the USB partition, but then you can boot to a Lion Recovery HD and re-install Lion even if the Mac has Mountain Lion installed.