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Apple releases Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, asserts its dominance over Snow Leopard
Distributing your OS digitally certainly makes for an easy upgrade, but what happens when your hard disk spontaneously combusts -- taking Lion's recovery partition with it? Unless you planned ahead and rolled your own install image, you were stuck taking an arduous and painful detour back to Snow Leopard before being given the chance to re-up with Cupertino's latest. That changes today, with the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, a utility that duplicates the OS's recovery partition onto an external drive of your choosing -- allowing you to boot directly into an installer which'll re-download the latest jungle cat, sans sojourn to 10.6. To do so, you'll need an external drive larger than 1GB, a machine running Lion, and the 1MB assistant we've linked below. Godspeed Apple fanboys, but to the rest of you -- now would be a pretty good time to verify those backups are still in working order, yeah?
Apple KB Article: Boot Camp doesn't work with multiple partitions
The first thing I do when I get a new Mac (or a new PC for that matter) is wipe out the hard drive, make two partitions, and do a fresh install on one of the partitions. I then store all my data on the other partition, just in case I ever need to reinstall the OS (is this a fool proof way to back up your data? Not by a long shot, since your data and the OS might be on different partitions but those partitions are still sitting on the same disk).Why am I talking about this? Because it would seem that people like me are left out in the cold with Boot Camp, since Boot Camp requires an Intel Mac with a single partition to work its magic. This makes sense since Boot Camp uses different partitioning magic, but it is still worth noting.
Intel Macs can boot from USB drives
Last week Dan posted about the new complications of Intel OS X drives not being bootable on PowerPC Macs, and vice-versa. The report came from Jon 'Wolf' Rentzsch, who recently updated the originating post with some specifics about booting and partition schemes, with one fairly positive detail: Intel based Macs can boot from USB2 drives. While many in the Mac community prefer FireWire over USB2 for various reasons, this will nevertheless open the doors for OS X to be bootable from more external hard drives. What are the chances I can bring a slimmed down OS X installation along with me on a 2 or 4 GB USB2 flash drive? I guess a geek can dream.
