The Easiest Way to Make a Lion Install Disk, USB, SD Card, or DVD is Lion DiskMaker
If you don’t want to deal with the already simple task of making a Lion USB install drive or boot DVD, you will probably like the little third party utility called Lion DiskMaker, it’s an AppleScript that handles everything for you as long as you have the requirements met.
In order to use LionDiskMaker, you will need three things:
- Lion downloaded from the Mac App Store ($29.99) – meaning “Install Mac OS X Lion.app” must be in your /Applications folder
- 5GB or greater disk to use as the installer, cheap USB keys are all over Amazon.com
– note that our own commenters have mentioned the installer won’t fit on a 4GB card so we’ll continue to recommend an 8GB USB key, but a 4.7GB blank DVD will work as well - Lion DiskMaker – free 380k download from Guillaume Gete’s website
– note that our own commenters have mentioned the installer won’t fit on a 4GB card so we’ll continue to recommend an 8GB USB key, but a 4.7GB blank DVD will work as wellOnce you have the necessary components, the target USB/DVD/SD card will be wiped and the AppleScript simply automates the process of creating the boot disk out of that disk for you. This is as easy as it gets, so if you didn’t want to open up Disk Utility on your own and you can’t wait for Apple’s official $69 USB key to come out later this year, here ya go.
Before jumping on a DVD though be aware that installing Lion from a DVD is much slower than using a USB drive, and even the creator recommends using a USB disk as the preferred method. If English isn’t your native language, there is also a French version available on the developers website. This is a nice little find by 9to5mac!
FYI if you run in to the error “There was a problem installing Mac OS X. Try reinstalling” don’t forget to clear your PRAM (thanks to
https://discussions.apple.com/message/15725779)
[…] Make a USB stick installer out of because the Lion installer self destructs (kind of) after the install: https://osxdaily.com/2011/08/02/easy-way-to-make-lion-install-disk/ […]
[…] primary purpose of this is so that you can make a Lion install drive or use the recently available easy Lion Disk Maker tool. We probably should have posted this much earlier to clear up any potential confusion, but better […]
Actually yes 4 GB flash drive does fit. Because the total size of the lion installation is 3.8 GB but somehow Apple made the DMG size to be 4.18 GB which won’t fit on 4 GB if you do a restore from disk utility.
all you have to do is just open the DMG, copy all the contents to your flash drive ( make sure to show all hidden files on finder first and also format your flash drive as mac os extended journal )
I have tried this and worked on my late 2010 15″ and 13″ macbook pro.
Nice trick, good to know!
The demented and challenged Apple engineer that prepared the DMG should be moved to flipping burgers for a while.
Not only there are 280MB of wasted free space, the DMG is highly fragmented (1500+ fragments per file), with said free space lodged at the beginning of the volume, so that it is not possible to recover it using hditool.
When you format your USB key, don’t use GUID or you will lose 200MB to the mandatory EFI partition, just use Apple Partition Map.
The USB key will still be able to boot (the DMG is APM as well).
Shouldn’t it be “Lion DiskMaker”? rather than Loin?
Great tips.
I have just recently “discovered” osXDaily and must say, it is a great resource.
Thank you for your efforts.
Cheers from Oz
Oops good catch on the typo, thanks for that
This app is for the lazy.
Remember to hold down OPTION while you download from the App Store if you already have Lion installed, took me a while to figure that out and it was a pain to make a disk.
Thanks for the reminder about redownloading, I will make a separate post about that.
you have to hold option while you click onto purchases and then the installed turns into purchase, it doesn’t buy it twice it just downloads again.
Here we go:
https://osxdaily.com/2011/08/02/re-download-mac-os-x-lion-from-app-store/
Your way is actually the lazy way, this one requires more work. Flawed logic you have there!