Download Apple’s recovery partition tool for Lion

Lion Recovery Disk Assistant is Apple’s Lion recovery tool that allows you to create a recovery partition for Lion on any external hard drive (hd).

All you need for Lion Recovery Disk Assistant to work is a USB stick or external hard drive with at least 1GB of space on it to create your own recovery hd.

The tool will allow OSX lion recovery for users that suffer total hard drive failure. Currently, Lion creates a Lion boot recovery on your hard drive when you install it but that’s not much use to you if your entire hd fails. Lion Recovery Disk Assistant will allow you to reinstall Lion, repair the hard drive using Disk Utility, restore Lion from Time Machine or just browse the web with Safari. Note however that it does not create a Lion recovery USB stick/DVD – it simply creates a partition onto which you can redownload Lion from the Apple store and restore Lion to your system.

To use it, simply download Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, connect an external drive or USB stick to your Mac, launch the assistant, select the drive where you would like to install, and follow the on-screen instructions. Voila, you’ve got a hard copy of Lion to restore it from in case of hard drive failure.

Note that when the process is complete, the new partition will not be visible in Finder or Disk Utility. To access Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, reboot the computer while holding the Option key and then select Recovery HD from the Startup Manager.

If you were worried that you had no recovery hd for Lion or a hard copy of a recovery partition for Lion and want to know how to create a Lion boot recovery disk, then Lion Recovery Disk Assistant is all you need.