
Select the Reinstall Mac OS X option and select your external diskĤ. Connect an erased external disk with at least 10 GBs of free spaceģ. Boot your Mac from your Recovery HD partition by holding down Command-R at startupĢ. You can use this behavior to capture the InstallESD disk image that Apple uses for its Lion installer. Once your Mac has the installer fully downloaded, it will then reboot and install OS X.

Once it has those, your Mac will have the correct installer pushed to it. It does this by looking at the type of Mac you have and the serial number. When reinstalling your OS using Recovery HD, Apple will send you the correct installer for your hardware. However, there is a way to get an installer for your new hardware from Apple.


For folks doing managed deployments, this can cause an issue because you may have new hardware that uses a build of Mac OS X that’s newer than the version that’s available in the Mac App Store. One of the changes with Lion is that Apple is no longer including install media with new Macs.
