Apple has released a utility Lion Recovery Disk Assistant

The new operating system Mac OS X Lion sold only in the App Store. It still can not buy physical media (later Apple will release a USB flash drive with the Lion for $ 69). The Apple sure that the user should forget about optical drives.

But how can that be if there was a terrible and need to reinstall the OS? For this Lion in the time of installation creates a hidden partition for recovery - Recovery HD. And what if the drive has been physically damaged? If the Recovery HD is not working? Here in this case, and we will need Lion Recovery Disk Assistant.

Lion Recovery Disk Assistant lets you expand that recovery (the same Recovery HD) on an external USB-drive. In principle, nothing new here. Advanced users and geeks knew from the beginning how to make a bootable DVD / USB-flash with Lion. Now, Apple offered a utility with a simple user interface that can make a replica Recovery HD.

To work Lion Recovery Disk Assistant requires an existing Recovery HD and external USB-disk with 1 GB free space (1 GB - because we do not create a disc of Lion, but only copy the partition to recovery). LRDA after shutdown, you will have a flash card section, which is not visible either in the Finder, or Disk Utility. To gain access to this section, the stick should be connected to a computer, and when you restart your computer holding down the Option key. You will be able to choose Recovery HD in the download manager. Well, then everything is standard - to reinstall Lion, restore from backup Time Machine.

[MacWorld]