Mountain Lion to Lion?

[magpye2]

I have an early 2011 MacBook Pro which came with OS X Lion installed on it. I have recently upgraded to Mountain Lion, but I have noticed that the HD Recovery partition has been changed to a Mountain Lion image. How would I go about reinstalling Lion on my Mac as I don't have a USB with the Lion recovery on it.

If for instance, I was to completely reformat my hdd and use the Internet Recovery option, would Lion be re-installed as it was the original version of OS X that was shipped with my Mac or would Mountain Lion be installed instead?

Some help would be gratefully appreciated. I did do a full Time Machine backup of my system before I installed Mountail Lion, but does that include the hidden Recovery Partition as well?

 

[maflynn]

If you don't have the install backed up somewhere and/or a USB with Lion, there there's no way for you to downgrade.

 

[steve-p]

I've updated both my MBPs to ML, but in the Mac App Store I still have OS X Lion listed as a purchase, and it would allow me to download the installer. Not sure what would happen if you tried to install it over ML though.

Is this hypothetical, or do you really want to go back?

 

[AlexBass]

Lion isn't in the app store anymore, but if you purchased Lion, it should appear under the 'purchases' tab.

If not, I'm sure you can get a pirated version :|

 

[NewbieCanada]

Does the early 2011 have internet recovery? (Cmd-R on reboot)

I pressed that while having some problems on my mini, and it wanted to reinstall Lion, not Mountain Lion. I didn't continue it, mind you, so I don't know if it would work.

 

[magpye2]

Yes it does have internet recovery, but I'm asking the question in a hypothetical nature as I quite like Mountan Lion, but if I was to sell the early 2011 MacBook Pro and but a new MAC, I would like to be able to restore the OS back to its original state.

 

[magpye2]

I have just tried booting into Internet Recovery to see which OS it would be installed and it has come up with Mountain Lion.