Current Mac Pros w/ Lion - how to recover from OS disc failure?

[mustgroove]

- Current Mac Pros, like all current Macs, don't come with OS install discs... so the Recovery HD partition is supposed to cover the need to reinstall Lion afresh.

- But what if the main disc fails entirely? That is, you also lose your Recovery HD partition? Mac Pros don't have Internet Recovery in their firmware, so installing to a totally fresh disc installed inside the Mac Pro itself doesn't seem to be an option...

- Is the only solution to just install Lion onto a new disc using a different machine, and then install that disc into the Mac Pro?

 

[Tricone]

- Current Mac Pros, like all current Macs, don't come with OS install discs... so the Recovery HD partition is supposed to cover the need to reinstall Lion afresh.

- But what if the main disc fails entirely? That is, you also lose your Recovery HD partition? Mac Pros don't have Internet Recovery in their firmware, so installing to a totally fresh disc installed inside the Mac Pro itself doesn't seem to be an option...

- Is the only solution to just install Lion onto a new disc using a different machine, and then install that disc into the Mac Pro?

Well, if you did create a Lion Recovery Disk using (Apple's Lin Recovery Disk Assistant) and didn't lose your Recovery HD partition, then you would be okay:

Lion Recovery Disk Assistant

Otherwise, create your own bootable Lion Recovery DVD. Here's one suggestion as to how:

http://lifehacker.com/5823096/how-to-burn-your-own-lion-install-dvd-or-flash-drive

Or do a google search for UniBeast, which does the following:

"This tool creates a bootable USB drive from your Mac App Store purchased copy of Install Mac OS X Lion or your Apple Store purchased OS X Lion USB Thumb Drive. With the resulting USB drive you can do do a clean install or use it as a rescue boot drive. "

 

[monkeybagel]

- Current Mac Pros, like all current Macs, don't come with OS install discs... so the Recovery HD partition is supposed to cover the need to reinstall Lion afresh.

- But what if the main disc fails entirely? That is, you also lose your Recovery HD partition? Mac Pros don't have Internet Recovery in their firmware, so installing to a totally fresh disc installed inside the Mac Pro itself doesn't seem to be an option...

- Is the only solution to just install Lion onto a new disc using a different machine, and then install that disc into the Mac Pro?

I was wondering this as well - do they not come with the USB key with Lion on it for recovery since Internet Recovery is not an option? It's not really like Apple to make people make recovery media for restoring their computer.

 

[ashman70]

Your other option is to use something like Carbon Copy Cloner and setup a separate partition on another physical disk, and clone your boot partition to this. You can schedule CCC to clone every day so its up to date.