On Sep 12, 2011, at 4:44 PM, Michael Winter wrote: > Because drives fail. A hardware failure can knock out all partitions. > > A drive replacement, followed by booting from the external drive, > repartitioning/formatting, then restore gets you up and running (though I > hadn't thought about restoring the recovery partition). > > Is there a better way? What's the best way to handle a drive replacement in a > situation like that (or even if you want a bigger drive)? I haven't checked > into the network booting, but I'm hesitant to rely on that.
If the goal is bare metal restore/disaster recovery, you could have partitioned the external USB drive first and then used the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant to put a Lion Recovery partition on the Time Machine drive. And/or, since this is a Macbook Pro with internal optical drive (a model introduced before the Lion release*), you could burn a DVD from the Lion installer package and keep that handy. Or use said Lion Recovery Disk Assistant to create an emergency USB stick; you only need 1GB free. http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1433 If it were a model introduced after Lion was released (currently only the Macbook Airs and the new Mini) you can actually do a bare metal restore via the internet, booting the machine from the cloud: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718 *you actually have more disaster recovery options for this hardware then owners of newer models. From here on out you won't be able to install from an installer such as the Apple USB Thumb Drive (or, presumably, from a burned Lion installer DVD). You'll be required to use Lion Recovery. Which means a network connection. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4905_______________________________________________ MacOSX-talk mailing list MacOSX-talk@omnigroup.com http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk
