[Editor's note: This article is part of our. We also have a.] Unlike previous versions of Mac OS X, Lion (OS X 10.7) doesn’t ship on a bootable disc—it’s available only as an installer app downloadable from the Mac App Store, and that installer doesn’t require a bootable installation disc. Indeed, this lack of physical media is perhaps the biggest complaint about Lion’s App Store-only distribution, as there are a good number of reasons you might want a bootable Lion installer, whether it be a DVD, a thumb drive, or an external hard drive. For example, if you want to on multiple Macs, a bootable installer drive can be more convenient than downloading or copying the entire Lion installer to each computer. Also, if your Mac is experiencing problems, a bootable installer drive makes a handy emergency disk.

(Lion features a new (also called Lion Recovery), but not all installations of Lion get it—and if your Mac’s drive is itself having trouble, recovery mode may not even be available. Also, if you need to reinstall Lion, recovery mode requires you to download the entire 4GB Lion installer again.) Finally, a bootable installer drive makes it easier to (assuming you have the license to do so). Thankfully, it’s easy to create a bootable Lion-install volume from the Lion installer that you download from the Mac App Store; just follow the steps below. Update: When this article was originally published, the Mac App Store version of Lion would not boot any Macs released in mid-2011 or later, as those models shipped with a newer version of Lion preinstalled.

However, unlike with the CD- and DVD-based Mac OS X installers of old, Apple can—and does—update the Mac App Store version of the Lion installer. So if you create a bootable Lion-installer drive using the current version of the Lion installer—which, as of 2/10/2012, installs OS X 10.7.3—that drive will work with all current Lion-capable Macs. If your only Mac was released after Lion, so you can't download the Lion installer from the Mac App Store, I've also Part 1: For all types of media • Once you’ve purchased Lion, find the Lion installer on your Mac. It’s called Install Mac OS X Lion.app and it should have been downloaded to /Applications.

Connect the bootable installer to a compatible Mac. Use Startup Manager or Startup Disk preferences to select the bootable installer as the startup disk, then start up from it. Your Mac will start up to macOS Recovery. Learn about selecting a startup disk, including what to do if your Mac doesn't start up from it. Choose your language, if prompted. Power off the mac. Then start the Mac and hold down the Command and R keys at startup. Hold these keys until the Apple logo appears. After your computer finishes starting up, you should see a desktop with an OS X menu bar and an OS X Utilities window.

• Right-click (or Control+click) the installer, and choose Show Package Contents from the resulting contextual menu. • In the folder that appears, open Contents, then open Shared Support; you’ll see a disk-image file called InstallESD.dmg. • Launch Disk Utility (in /Applications/Utilities). • Drag the InstallESD.dmg disk image into Disk Utility’s left-hand sidebar. Right-click (or Control+click) on the Lion installer to view its contents.