Install Macos Lion Using A Bootable Dvd

For one, this method does not include a bootable DVD, which would allow you to perform clean installs on your Mac, as well as having a bootable OS from which to run Disk Utility. Apple attempted to address the need to be able to run Disk Utility by including a recovery drive with Lion. During the Lion installation process, a special recovery disk partition is created. It includes a stripped-down version of Lion that lets you boot your Mac and run a small number of utilities, including Disk Utility. It also lets you reinstall Lion, if necessary. However, if the drive that the recovery partition is on goes bad, you’re out of luck. It’s possible to use a few utilities available from Apple to create additional Recovery HD drives, but it doesn’t address the portability and ease of using a macOS Lion DVD to repair multiple Macs or install the OS as needed. For this and many other reasons, you need to know how to create a bootable version of the macOS Lion installer and how to use the bootable DVD to erase a hard drive and then install Lion on it.

Create the Bootable DVD

Creating a bootable macOS Lion install DVD is fairly easy. The complete steps are outlined in the following article: Create a Bootable Copy of OS X Lion. Follow those instructions and return here to learn how to use the DVD to perform an erase and install of macOS Lion. If you would rather make use of a USB flash drive to hold the bootable installer, you can use the instructions found in this guide: Create a Bootable Flash Drive With OS X Lion Installer.

Erase and Install

This process—sometimes referred to as a clean install—lets you install Lion on a disk that is empty or has no pre-existing OS installed on it. You use the bootable macOS install DVD you created to install Lion on a disk that you erase as part of the installation process. You will be erasing one of your volumes to use as the target for the Lion install, so you should have a complete, current backup of that drive. All the data on the drive will be lost. If you have a current backup, you’re ready to continue.

Boot From the macOS Lion Install DVD

Erase the Target Disk