Showing posts with label OS X. Show all posts

Lion DiskMaker Creates Mac OS X Lion Install DVDs and Thumb Drives Automatically

Saturday, August 6, 2011 // by Saurabh // Labels: Mac OS X, Mac OS X Lion, OS X, Softwares, Tweaks // No comments:

We've shown you how to manually create a bootable Mac OS X Lion DVD or thumb drive, but now an app called Lion DiskMaker can automate the process for you. You just download it, insert the media you want to use to create your install, and let it take care of the rest.

Mac OS X Lion DVD Maker

For Lion DiskMaker to work, you'll need to have a copy of Lion installed to your Applications folder. Once it's there, just launch the app and it'll locate it. Once it does, you'll get to choose what type of media you want to use to create the install disk. If you want to use something like an SD card instead of a USB thumb drive, you can still do that by using the thumb drive. Just choose what you want and let Lion DiskMaker handle the rest. If you want a physical copy of Lion but don't want to do much work to get one, this free little utility can help you out.

Lion DiskMaker

How to Burn Your Own OS X Lion Install DVD or USB Drive

// by Saurabh // Labels: Mac OS X, Mac OS X Lion, OS X, Tweaks // No comments:

Getting Lion from the App Store is convenient, but if you want a physical copy of the installation, you can easily make your own Lion install DVD or USB drive with Disk Utility.

If you want to do a clean installation of Lion (or you want to install it on a Hackintosh), you'll need to install it on some sort of physical media. Apple will be releasing a flash drive installer for a whopping $70 in August, but you don't need to wait (or pay twice the OS's price) to get it. It's very easy to burn Apple's installer to a single layer DVD or flash drive of 5GB or larger.

Important: Note that the Lion installer deletes itself if you upgrade, so if you want to do this, you have to do it before you update your computer to Lion. You can always re-download Lion after the fact, but geez, who wants to do that? Once you've got it on your system, here's what you do:

How to Install Mac OS X Lion from DVD or USB

Download Lion from the Mac App Store. The installer should show up in your Applications folder.

Right-click on the installer and hit "Show Package Contents". Navigate to Contents > SharedSupport and look for a file called "InstallESD.dmg".

Open up Disk Utility and drag the DMG file into the left-hand sidebar. If you're burning it to a DVD, insert your DVD, select the disk image in the sidebar, and hit the "Burn" button. Skip down to the last step to use it.

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. Go to the Partition tab and select "1 Partition" from the dropdown menu. Choose "Mac OS Extended (Journaled) on the left.

Hit the Options button under the partition table and choose "GUID Partition Table". You'll need this to make the drive bootable on a Mac. Hit the Apply button when you're done to format your drive (note: it will erase everything on the drive).

Click on the "Restore" tab, choose the InstallESD.dmg file as the source and your flash drive as the destination. Hit the Apply button and it will create your bootable USB drive.

Reboot into OS X and hold the option key when you hear the startup chime. You can boot into your DVD or flash drive from there.

You'll not only be able to install Lion from this drive, but you'll also be able to use Disk Utiltiy, recover from a Time Machine backup, and do everything else you could do with the old installation DVDs. Note that when you install Lion, it'll create a recovery partition with all these features anyway, so you don't need the DVD unless you're doing a clean install. Though it's always nice to have around in case something happens, like you erase your entire drive. Not that that's ever happened to me 3 times in one week or anything.