I have a MacBook Air (11-inch, Mid 2012) MD223LL/A MBAIR 11.6/1.7/4/64FLASH running OS X 10.7.5. It shipped with Lion. I want to reinstall the OS on the laptop without an internet connection. Is this possible on these newer machines? What are the steps?
Use-case:
The main purpose of the Macbook Air is to use it on the road when i travel. recently, I was testing my client's app on it and made lots of changes to the OS settings. Experimentation led to instability and the fastest way to get back is to reinstall the OS to a fresh start. I want it to be possible from a placewith out internet as well. On top of it, I just realized that I can't reinstall OS X even with wifi using the recovery console, it led to the screen saying 'Could not find installation information for this machine. Contact AppleCare'. I paid a per-incident AppleCare call and they said they do not support non-internet recovery anymore and I have to take it to a care center to reinstall the OS for me(in the post laptop era, owner has no control of OS installation any more). Probably I have to end up paying to reinstall OS X, but I think I would use a disk cloner from now on.
Best Answer
You could make a bootable drive with the Lion installer. To do so, you'll need the original Lion Installer, downloadable from the Mac App Store once you've purchased it and a USB flash drive with a GUID Partition Table format. You'll find here a step by step guide for the formatting part. Afterwards just:
If everything was done correctly, you'll, then, have a drive from which you'll be able to boot just by holding C while restarting your computer.