Today, Apple released Lion Recovery Disk Assistant software in order to better serve users who need to create recovery partitions on external drives.  The software builds upon Apple's Recovery features within Mac OS X Lion by adding support for creating a Recovery Disk on external drives.

The release notes from Apple mention that the resulting partition will have all of the same capabilities as the built-in Lion Recovery: reinstall Lion, repair the disk using Disk Utility, restore from a Time Machine backup, or surf the web via Safari.

In order to create an external Lion Recovery with the assistant, you'll need a Mac that already has an existing Recovery HD.  The external drive will also need to have at least 1GB of free space.  The Lion Recovery Disk Assistant comes in as a lightweight 1.07MB download.

It should be noted that the new partition won't show up in the Finder nor in Disk Utility on Mac OS X, however you can simply access it by rebooting the Mac while holding the Option key.

Just a heads up though that users are warned that the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant will wipe out all data on the external hard drive.  Apple advises that users back up data or create a new partition on the drive prior to running the assistant.

Apple also continues that if the Recovery HD is created for a Mac that shipped with Lion, then the external recovery drive can only be used with that system.  On the bright side, if the assistant happens to run a Mac that made the jump from Snow Leopard to Lion, then the external recovery drives can be used on other systems that upgraded from Snow Leopard.

via AppleInsider

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