How to make a bootable OSX 10.7 Lion Disc or Drive from the downloaded Lion.app

July 23, 2011 6 Comments

lion-osx-10-7-icon

lion-osx-10-7-icon

I know Apple are going away from optical media, pushing it the same way as the old floppy disk but heck it’s still nice to have a bootable OSX disk or drive in times of need.

 

After downloading the Lion.App from the store aka “Install Mac OS X Lion”, control click it to bring up a contextual menu and select “Show Package” contents from the menu.

 

show-package-contents

show-package-contents

This brings up a Contents folder, from here navigate to Contents/Shared Support/InstallESD.dmg, and thats the disk image to burn. Double click it, you can skip the verifying process, then the disk image mounts as a volume in the sidebar.

shared-support-location-disk-osx-lion

shared-support-location-disk-osx-lion

Select the mounted volume in the sidebar then either click on the burn icon if you have it set up or choose the option from the File menu, pop in a blank DVD and thats a job done.

burn-osx-disc-lion

burn-osx-disc-lion

 

To keep a separate image of the dmg, option drag a copy to your desktop, this will make a copy of the InstallESD.dmg leaving the original Lion app intact.

 

You can also use /Utilities/Disk Utility to do the same thing, just launch Disk Utility, highlight the InstallESD.dmg and burn.

burn-from-disk-utility

burn-from-disk-utility

To make a bootable image to a drive instead of a disk, you need to do a restore in Disk Utility, select the InstallESD.dmg as the source and the disk volume as the destination. Enusure that the destination volume is correctly formatted as HFS+ Extended Journaled. Click “Restore”.

Create a boot drive for Lion OSX

Create a boot drive for Lion OSX

If you haven’t got the Lion App to start with and can’t re-download it from the App store, you can still make a partial boot drive from the hidden Recovery Partition, check it out.

Related posts:

  1. Make a Bootable USB Drive from OS X Lion Using the Recovery Partition
  2. Easiest Way to Make an Image or USB bootable Copy of of OSX Lion 10.7
  3. Disappearing Hard Disk Space on OS X Lion 10.7
  4. Can’t download the additional components needed to install Mac OS X
  5. Create an up to date image of OS X Lion 10.7 Using InstaDMG
Imaging, OS X, Tech
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  • Frank

    I only have the new macbook air. Appstore won’t let me download. In appstore, it says already installed. How do I get if I don’t have another mac to download lion to a disk?

    • Neil Gee

      Go to the App Store
      Hold down the OPTION key, click on the “Purchase” section
      You should see “OS X Lion” and “Install” should be grey, click that to re-download Lion

  • Frank

    Nope doesn’t work y macbook came with Lion installed. I didn’t purchase from AppStore

    • Neil Gee

      Ah ok, since you didn’t buy from the App store, you can’t re-download – in this instance the only thing you can do to reinstall the OS X 10.7 on that particular machine by restarting and holding down the “command” + “r” keys – this puts the machine into a recovery boot mode and then you can follow the prompts to re-install Lion leaving your other files intact.

  • Alinde

    Does this method basically allow one to use LION via the DVD only?  I’m hoping to download Lion to use only vis-a-vis my iPad, but I don’t yet like the separate partition or external hard drive approaches.  

    • http://coolestguyplanettech.com Neil Gee

      the method effectively make an installation dvd disc of Lion to install on a regular Mac, the iPad uses a different OS, the iOS