In order to directly boot into the recovery partition. The OS X Lion download is about 4 GB large. OS X Lion isĭownloaded over the Internet from Apple when Lion Recovery is used for The Internet via Wi-Fi or an Ethernet connection. Reinstalling OS X Lion via Lion Recovery requires broadband access to Lion Recovery (requires internet connection) You can boot into your DVD or flash drive from there. Reboot into OS X and hold the option key when you hear the startup chime. Hit the “Apply” button and it will create your bootable USB drive. Hit the “Apply” button when you’re done to format your drive (note: it will erase everything on the drive).Ĭlick on the “Restore” tab, choose the InstallESD.dmg file as the source and your flash drive as the destination. You’ll need this to make the drive bootable on a Mac. Hit the “Options” button under the partition table and choose “GUID Partition Table”.Choose “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” on the left. Go to the Partition tab and select “1 Partition” from the dropdown menu.

If you want to burn Lion to a USB flash drive, plug it in and click on it in the left-hand sidebar in Disk Utility.If you’re burning it to a DVD, insert your DVD, select the disk image in the sidebar, and hit the “Burn” button. Open up Disk Utility and drag the DMG file into the left-hand sidebar.Navigate to Contents/SharedSupport and look for a file called InstallESD.dmg.

Right-click on the installer and hit “Show Package Contents”.

The installer should show up in your Applications folder.

Buy and download Lion from the Mac App Store.

Create a bootable OS X Lion USB stick or DVD based on the Mac App Store download

Mac os lion bootable usb