Thought that in the absence of Apple installation media, using a full Lion installation on and external drive would be the easiest way to perform a clean install? Wrong. Apple’s official Lion Installation Media is in the details… Step by step instructions after the video tutorial.
- Purchase and download Lion from the Mac App Store on any Lion compatible Mac running Snow Leopard.
- Right click on “Mac OS X Lion” installer and choose the option to “Show Package Contents.”
- Inside the Contents folder that appears you will find a SharedSupport folder and inside the SharedSupport folder you will find the “InstallESD.dmg.” This is the Lion boot disc image we have all been waiting for.
- Copy “InstallESD.dmg” to another folder like the Desktop.
- Launch Disk Utility and click the burn button.
- Select the copied “InstallESD.dmg” as the image to burn, insert a standard sized 4.7 GB DVD, and wait for your new Lion Boot Disc to come out toasty hot.
It is important that you burn your Lion boot disc or archive the Lion installer prior to installing Lion itself. If left in the Applications folder the Lion installer will be removed after the completion of a successful Lion installation. If you are reading this article after upgrading to Lion all may not be lost. Check the root level of your Macintosh hard drive for a directory entitled “lost+found.” Inside this directory you may find a 3.7GB file called “iNode.” Double click on this file and the Lion Mac OS X Installer image will mount. You can use this image to burn a Lion boot disc using Disk Utility, or archive the iNode file for later use by giving it the “.dng” file extension. A fresh copy of the Lion installer can always be redownloaded from the Mac App Store should you need it.
With the Lion boot disc you can boot any Lion compatible Mac, and install 10.7 just like you installed previous versions of Mac OS X. You can even use Disk Utility’s Restore function to image your Lion boot disc image onto a external drive suitable for performing a clean install on a optical-drive-less MacBook Air, or Mac mini. Clean installs with Lion are easy once you find where Apple has hidden the boot disk.
Thanks to EGGFRECKLES
