Lion DiskMaker makes it easier to create a bootable Lion installer

08.05.2012
I’ve written quite a bit about and about the benefits of . While the latter process isn’t prohibitively difficult, it’s still a bit of a hassle. Developer Guillaume Gète has made it a bit easier with , an AppleScript-based utility that mostly automates the procedure.

Launch Lion DiskMaker, and it checks your Applications folder for a copy of the Lion installer app. Assuming it finds the installer in that location, Lion DiskMaker then asks if you want to create an installer DVD or a boot disk, with the latter meaning a flash drive or an external hard drive.

Choose Burn A DVD, and you’re prompted to insert a blank, 4.7GB (single-layer) DVD. Unfortunately, you don’t see a progress bar while the disc is being burned—the DVD is simply ejected when it’s finished. On my 2010 iMac, it took about 17 minutes to burn the disc. You can boot from the DVD by inserting it into your Mac, restarting, and holding down the C key at startup to force your Mac to boot from the optical drive.

Choose Create A Boot Disk, and you’re prompted to choose a volume: a USB thumb drive, an external hard drive, or a partition on another drive. After doing so, you also see a big, scary warning that this procedure will of course erase the contents of the chosen volume. But that warning notes that if you’ve chosen a partition of a drive, the process will also erase other partitions on that drive, as Lion DiskMaker will repartition the drive into a single volume. (A beta version, 1.7b1, of Lion DiskMaker allows you to use a partition on a multi-volume drive without affecting the other partitions.)

Click Erase Then Create The Disk to proceed. A Finder window with a name similar to will appear, gradually populated by the Lion installer and the system files required to make the drive bootable. Again, you won’t see a progress bar. Instead, you’ll see a file named Once this file disappears, Lion DiskMaker performs a few other tweaks, such as giving the disk a Lion-installer-volume icon. Finally, Lion DiskMaker displays a message that your bootable drive is ready. The process took around five minutes for me using an external USB drive. You can boot your Mac from the new drive by rebooting while holding down the Option key; when you see the OS X Startup Manager (the screen showing all bootable drives), choose the one with the Lion-installer icon.

What if you don’t have a copy of the Lion installer in /Applications? If you previously moved the Install Mac OS X Lion app to a different folder or drive, Lion DiskMaker may be able to find the installer on its own; if so, you see a dialog box indicating that location, and you just click Use This Copy. Otherwise, Lion DiskMaker will let you manually navigate to the Lion installer app or—if you previously extracted the InstallESD.dmg file (the disk image containing the Lion installer data) from the installer app—to the installer image. Once you’ve selected the installer app or disk image, Lion DiskMaker proceeds as described above.