Installing OS X Lion using a thumbdrive
by ashvala
Welcome back to Ashgadgets.wordpress.com. Today’s post will be about creating a USB thumb drive which you can use to install OS X lion on supported Macs.
First off, here are a list of things you need:
- A Mac running Snow Leopard version 10.6.6 or higher
- $30 to spare
- A thumb drive with a capacity of 5 Gigabytes or more.
Instructions:
- Download the Lion Update app from the Mac App Store
- Give the download some time, do something *productive* in those couple of hours.
- After it finishes downloading, open Finder and click on the Applications directory
- Scroll through the list until you see an “Install Mac OS X Lion” label.
- Right click and select: “Show Package Contents”
- Now follow this Linar Directory hierarchy: Contents > SharedSupport >
- Plug in your thumb drive and open Disk Utility. (A spotlight search should suffice)
- From the finder window, drag and drop the .dmg file you find in the SharedSupport directory into DiskUtility.
- Return to Disk Utility, select the USB drive and select the partition tab
- Click on the Current Scheme button and select single partition
- Set partition format to Mac OS Extended.
- Click on the options button below the partition table and select “GUID” as the partition table.
- Click “apply”
- Select the “Restore” button
- Drag “InstallESD.dmg” into the “Source” field
- Drag the partition you just created into the “Destination” field
- Select restore and wait for 10 minutes
- After the restoration is complete, restart your machine.
Whilst rebooting your machine, press the alt key as it boots up. You should see a “Mac OS X” label with a USB logo. The rest is fairly elementary. You should select the second option on the screen and there.
The only good thing that the thumb drive provides you with is that it’s a permanent copy of OS X Lion you possess. The downloaded file self-destructs after installation, and in case anything goes awry, you have a thumbdrive which you can use to restore your mac.
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