Slashdot Mirror
Creating a Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Bootable Flash Drive
WankerWeasel writes "With the release of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion this month, Apple will no longer offer a bootable installer DVD and is making 10.7 Lion available only through the App Store. This guide provides quick instructions on how to use the OS X 10.7 Lion installer to create a bootable flash drive (instructions for making a bootable DVD are also included on the blog)."
Does Apple provide a way to replace a hard drive? Without access to a booted system you can't download anything. Unless they want you to bring in your machine ...
I expect the stumbling block here is creating some sort of normal looking install media for MacOS Lion.
Once you've got that, it's actually pretty simple to target any USB storage device. Just install it like you would a normal disk. Pretty simple stuff.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
With the release of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion this month, Apple will no longer offer a bootable installer DVD and is making 10.7 Lion available only through the App Store.
Apple only announced that Lion would be available through the Mac App Store. They did not annouce anything else. All commentary on whether or not you will be able to burn a bootable disk, whether or not you will be able to purchase physical media, and so on, is merely uninformed speculation.
I thought these things didn't happen anymore!
Apple will no longer offer a bootable installer DVD ...
Note that everyone is talking about the 10.7 ***upgrade***. If you are buying a new mac with 10.7 preinstalled you will probably have DVD media to restore your system.
Or perhaps you don't live anywhere near an Apple store -- you do realise that there are countries in the world with only one or two, or even none whatsoever? And that some of those are actually big Apple markets? Like Scandinavia where every monkey and his uncle has an iPhone but there are basically no Apple stores? And perhaps you have capped broadband, with a 4gig download taking a massive chunk out of the monthly limit? Perhaps you both live in a country without an Apple store *and* have capped broadband or, horror of horrors, dialup internet?
It wouldn't take much for Apple to have just released this the normal way in addition to the Mac App Store. But no, they went about it this way, intentionally alienating a section of their market. Not a very large or profitable section, mind, which is why they don't give a shit. Likewise with ditching Rosetta.
Didn't they say it was going to be a USB Thumb drive?
Apple knows they cannot allow a non-bootable OS. If your drive crashes, WTF are you going to do? Anyways... lets get to the real deal. The downloadable version of Mac OS X lion has a bootable DMG in the Contents/Shared Resources directory.Its called InstallESD.dmg. Simply open DiskUtility and burn that to DVD, then you have a bootable disk.
For the Air it would have to be... but why not standardize. Great opportunity here for Apple.
Apple just invented this option. Linux never had it. Apple invented it because I saw in an Apple commercial that it's a cool new feature that they just invented.
> but instead how to specifically do this for Lion, since Lion doesn't come on a disc like previous versions.
Write the disk image to an actual CD.
That's kind of like what Linux has been doing since pretty much forever.
You can create your own private "app store" with Linux too.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Yeah, great to replace an optical disk that is cheap enough to be disposable with something that isn't quite so dirt cheap anymore.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I'm not arguing or trolling - do you have a source for that? The last I knew that was properly clear, it claimed that Lion would only be available as a download from the App Store. That came straight from Apple's comments at the WWDC.
Err, for consumers it's better - installing from USB thumb drive is FAR faster... Sure, it costs a little more for Apple to supply it.
But here's an idea, when they do Mac OS X 10.8 it would be really easy to write that image over your install USB to keep it current.
From the original post: "If you don't want an apple id, are on AOL dialup, etc. you could still get it in person at an apple store the old fashioned way."
Fuck's sake. Learn to read. And if you assumed I was just talking about the App store, what part of "And perhaps you have capped broadband, with a 4gig download taking a massive chunk out of the monthly limit?" seems confusing?
Are Apple's profits too infinitesimal for them to take the staggering loss of pennies by making millions of DVDs that nobody uses after the first install? Or are they trying to help the environment by forcing all their technically-gifted customers to buy USB flash drives so that we can install a single download onto multiple computers?
I think this move is every bit as misguided as Apple's Final Cut Pro X (iMovie Pro) and only slapping 2GB RAM onto brand new MacBooks - or Jobs' decision to not include a disk drive on the NeXt Cube (a decade before writable CD's were widely available). Yes, I use Macs, but more and more begrudgingly because those rich BASTARDS are being CHEAPSKATES.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
I bet there will only USB thumb drive reinstall media - but personally I think that's better.
Apple has stolen many great ideas over the years.
"Good artists copy; great artists steal." - Steve Jobs.
Although he is misquoting Picasso - "Lesser artists borrow; great artists steal", which some believe Picasso stole from someone else.
There is really very little original anymore, but sorting through the rubble of knowledge and knowing what to use and what to throw away takes great skill.
For the Air it would have to be... but why not standardize. Great opportunity here for Apple.
The restore media may have different contents depending on the product family, more than the operating system may be included. My several year old media seems product family specific. Even if the media is universal they could save a lot of money by using less expensive DVDs for the majority of the computers to be sold.
jobs is louseing it time for him to go!
He will likely F* the next mini with a i3 cpu and on board intel video that is weaker then todays mini with on board nvidia video. and have like 1-2 TB ports on linked at x4 so that will be like 8-12 unused pci-e lanes that are a good fit for some kind better video chip.
Are all Macs bootable from USB now? And is this a recent thing? I've never been able to get my 2007/2008ish MacBook 3.1 to boot Linux from a USB, so I've always had to burn it to CD first.
He said "I don't see how it's supposedly difficult, it's like DOS and Windows."
If you can't see the problem right there, you are lost.
Fandroids hate facts.
initial release of Lion is via the app store, a DVD will follow, at extra cost. It is no different to what a number of major PC companies have done, eg HP, with preinstalled versions of Windoze and a promise to reinstall if the HD fails under warranty. You can save the install app to a DVD or backup drive, you can install Lion on many of your home computers and reinstall Lion by mounting the repaired machine as a HD on the desktop of another Mac. or you can right click on the install app and burn the disk image, dmg, to a DVD, So the story is, What??
There was an unknown error in the submission.
they want to make sure its stable before patenting it
Most people switch OSes because the OS sucks, not because one app for the OS sucks.
Perhaps their policy in places like Scandinavia and Australia will be different based on those regions strict bandwidth policies. Apple goes out of their way pretty well for other markets (just look at their localization of the OS, for example), and aren't as typically ego-centric-American as most US companies seem to be, in my opinion.
Linux has had this option for ages. How often does Apple play catch up with the OSS community?
Hate to break it to you but Mac OS has had this option longer than Linux has been around.
Ermm, no. You've been able to do this with Apple ever since, I don't know, Disk Utility v.1.0?
This is not a new feature for Apple. They don't even want you to know this is a feature. People who don't know how to use Disk Utility won't ever know they need it and people who need to do a clean install of Lion know how to use Disk Utility already. This is the biggest non-issue in Apple history.
Except that you won't. You'll have a new Mac with a drive that has Lion with a recovery partition. No disks, sorry.
Lion is $30. If you go over your ATT limit and have to pay an extra $50 or whatever, you are still ahead by $50 over the traditional $130 OS X upgrade.
This is totally misguided!! Apple is totally shunning all those 56k people that... oh, that complaint came up already.
Uh... Oh oh Apple insists you gotta use a proprietary screwdriver to... dang, that one's here, too.
Ok.. ok... umm oh oh oh it's so confusing that they call it iOS, that's a Cisco thing!!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
They really like the iDevice model, where they are the gatekeepers and controllers of all your stuff. You buy everything for your device from them, from one place they control. They decide what can be sold, and they get a cut of everything. That model has worked real well for them. Their massive rise has not been because of their computer division, it has been because of their consumer electronics division and associated online store (don't believe the fanboys who say they make nothing on iTunes and so on).
Well they want that on the Mac too. They want you to get your apps from the app store. ALL your apps. To be able to have any chance of achieving that, they've first got to get the app store to be an extremely popular method of buying things. They have to get customers accustomed to buying from it, and get developers to accept they have to sell through it to make money.
The first step in that was offering deals for various pieces of their own software through it. An example is ARD. To buy it retail is $500. However you can get it from the app store for $80. Same product, same features. Why would they do it? Certainly a DVD doesn't cost $420. They do it to make the app store attractive.
This is the next step. Start making some of their stuff app store only. You want it? You HAVE to use the app store to get it. Get more people acquainted with the idea.
I'm quite sure the eventual goal is that everything will be all app store, all the time. Probably a long way off and they may not actually be able to achieve that, but that is what they want. Make MacOS like iOS where you have to buy from Apple's store to get anything.
they could make literally thousands of dollars selling computers to geeks instead of having to suffer through making billions of dollars selling computers to consumers.
oh snap.
Clearly Apple needs to come read slashdot forums so they can get their company back on track.
...or else their stock price might continue its perpetual slide into oblivion. I mean seriously, that company must be running on fumes now.
No, MacBooks just can't run at SATA III speeds. This is because the SATA cable is insufficient'y shielded, and since it's not COAX, if you put in a very fast drive, it'll happily negotiate the higher 6Gb/S data rate and then get errors and crash because of it.
So it's really not a good idea to put the jumped up SSD drives in as a replacement for the existing drives (and no, a real and shielded SATA III coax has insufficient clearance to install in place of the old cable; the tolerances are too tight).
-- Terry
For some people the only reason they use a particular OS is because the app they want to use only runs on that OS. Once that app becomes useless/annoying to them then there's nothing stopping going back to the OS they want to use.
"Yeah Tommy, before Zee Germans get here
Sounds like it was a dumb idea to buy a computer that has no local support?
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
If I remember I'll get back to you about that. There are Apple resellers here (in Norway) and if Apple are releasing any physical media it would go to them. But the internet company I'm with offer uncapped broadband, so it might be in Norway, at least, Apple assume people will be able to download without killing their bandwidth allowance.
No, not really. There's an online presence, technical support, and resellers who offer repair services. Ultimately I've no doubt those resellers will have Lion images and anyone running into any of these issues can just go in and have it put on their computer. (That's pretty much what I found in South Africa, which also has no Apple stores.)
The point being that he wasn't intimidated by it.
Your reading comprehension sucks.
--
BMO