Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

diamondschwin

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 2, 2002
84
0
I have 2 lion partitions, one which I use for everyday work and one I use for new builds of software to test the compatibility with systems we have at work (audio and video post) I used to do snow leopard and lion which was fine because lion was the only one that could really use the recovery partition. I am wondering with mountain lion how it would work, if I opt to reinstall my software from the recovery partition would it let me select a lion OR mountain lion install?
 
I have 2 lion partitions, one which I use for everyday work and one I use for new builds of software to test the compatibility with systems we have at work (audio and video post) I used to do snow leopard and lion which was fine because lion was the only one that could really use the recovery partition. I am wondering with mountain lion how it would work, if I opt to reinstall my software from the recovery partition would it let me select a lion OR mountain lion install?

I can answer half of your question. A recovery partition will only install the OS version that created the partition. So a Lion Recovery HD partition will install Lion and a ML Recovery HD partition will install ML.

What am not sure of is what will happen to Recovery HD if you install Lion and ML at the same time? I suspect last install would create its own Recovery HD partition. So if you have Lion already, then install ML, the ML install would overwrite the Lion Recovery HD with one from ML.

If you don't mind, can you post back what happens to the Recovery HD(s) when you do this. I am curious now. :)
 
found this online, seems the mountain lion gains its own recovery partition.

http://www.chriswrites.com/2012/04/how-to-dual-boot-your-mac-with-os-x-lion-and-mountain-lion/


I will make my dual boot on monday when I am back at the office.

There is a section on dual booting in my free iBook. Yes, each OS partition gets its own recovery partition and you will see all 4 partitions when you are booting and hold alt (opt).

Regarding Internet Recovery: when I was writing the book the internet recovery did not update to ML. It stayed at Lion on all my macs. I am not sure if an update since then has updated Internet Recovery to ML.

Be aware that there is a small and annoying glitch when dual booting. Each OS will try to read and index the other OS's partition. One of the reprecussions of this is that the OS will believe that you have installed app X from the app store, even though it's only installed on the other partition. You need to unmount the other partition to prevent this. Also the OS gets confused about writing and reading settings. So, for example, if you remove the ML partition from spotlight indexing in Lion, then in ML the ML partition will also be removed. Hence why I suggest ejecting the other partition to stop this.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.