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How To: Make OS X Lion Offline Installer DVD and USB Thumb Drive

ByLiew Cheon-Fong

Lion roar
Krane – Fotolia.com

As you might already know, Apple’s Mac OS X Lion is online download upgrade only and OS X Lion in USB thumb drive cost you USD$60 (twice the OS’s price).

Do you know that you can create your own OS X Lion installation DVD or flash drive for FREE, and it is easy to do so?

In this article, you will learn how to create a bootable OS X Lion installer DVD and thumb drive. Free of charge. All you need is a OS X Lion installer downloaded (don’t install!) from Mac App Store, a blank DVD disc or flash drive (5GB or larger).

Note that if you already upgrade to Lion, the installer has deleted itself. You have to re-download OS X Lion to have the installer again…

Table of Contents

1. Retrieve OS X Lion disk image

OS X Lion installESD.dmg

Right-click on the OS X installer and click “Show Package Contents”. Open “Contents” folder, then “SharedSupport”. You will get a file called “InstallESD.dmg”.

2A. Burn offline OS X Lion installer DVD

If you want to burn a OS X Lion DVD:

  1. Insert blank DVD into your Mac
  2. Now, open “Disk Utility” app and drag the “InstallESD.dmg” file into the left-hand sidebar of Disk Utility.
  3. Select the disk image (.dmg) in the Disk Utility’s sidebar, and click “Burn” button to start burning DVD.

2B. Make offline OS X Lion installer flash drive

It takes more steps to make an OS X Lion thumb drive:

  1. Plug in your thumb drive and select it in the left-hand sidebar in Disk Utility.
  2. Goto “Partition” tab and select “1 Partition” from the “Partition Layout” dropdown menu.
  3. Under “Partition Information”, choose “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” for “Format:”
  4. Click “Options…” button under the partition table and choose “GUID Partition Table”, so that the thumb drive is bootable.
  5. Click “Apply” button to format your thumb drive (all data on the thumb drive will be erased)
  6. After done formatting, click on the “Restore” tab, and choose the “InstallESD.dmg” file as “Source:” and your flash drive as the “Destination:”.
  7. Click “Restore” button to create your bootable OS X Lion thumb drive.

How to boot into OS X Lion installer DVD or USB thumb drive

To use the OS X Lion DVD and USB flash drive, you press and hold “Option” key when you hear Mac startup chime at start up. Then you can boot into DVD or flash drive there.

Though a recovery partition will be created when you install OS X Lion, a installation DVD or thunmb drive is good to have for “clean install” or new hard drive. Don’t need to spend time and bandwidth to re-download OS X Lion.

[via Lifehacker]

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