The next steps depend on whether you want to create a bootable hard drive or flash drive, or a bootable DVD. Right-click (or Control+click) on the Lion installer to view its contents.

Drag the InstallESD.dmg disk image into Disk Utility’s left-hand sidebar.

Launch Disk Utility (in /Applications/Utilities).

In the folder that appears, open Contents, then open Shared Support you’ll see a disk-image file called InstallESD.dmg.

Right-click (or Control+click) the installer, and choose Show Package Contents from the resulting contextual menu.

It’s called Install Mac OS X Lion.app and it should have been downloaded to /Applications. Once you’ve purchased Lion, find the Lion installer on your Mac.If your only Mac was released after Lion, so you can’t download the Lion installer from the Mac App Store, I’ve also provided instructions for creating a bootable Lion-install drive for newer Macs.

So if you create a bootable Lion-installer drive using the current version of the Lion installer-which, as of, installs OS X 10.7.3-that drive will work with all current Lion-capable Macs. 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. 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. 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. 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 install Lion over Leopard (assuming you have the license to do so). (Lion features a new recovery mode (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 your Mac is experiencing problems, a bootable installer drive makes a handy emergency disk. 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.įor example, if you want to install Lion on multiple Macs, a bootable installer drive can be more convenient than downloading or copying the entire Lion installer to each computer. 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.

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