Alternative Lion recovery?

Yesterday, lion stopped booting on my Macbook pro 2011 and since then I have been nothing short of miserable. Google suggested that I should use the Internet Recovery on my Lion but the downloading has been awful! The Internet Recovery showed me 200 hours initially(dial-up?) but then after half an hour came down to 8 hours. A 4gb file normally takes around 4-5 hours on my 2Mb connection so I was satisfied with 8 hours. I left it around at midnight and went to sleep but when I woke up at 6, the progress bar had barely moved and the download time was showing 25 hours, and after some time the downloading restarted and it was again showing me 11 hours. I left it again but after 3 hours the progress bar had barely budged. Then it restarted again. Then finally it downloaded through a professional grade internet connection at my office but that also took around 4 hours. Is there any way to create a bootable lion installer usb to prevent this mess again for a clean install? Where does internet recovery store the Lion installer? I know about Time Machine and i will definitely keep a backup now but can I burn a disc or a usb with the lion installer? I have seen this problem occuring with a guy on these forums who had a 20 Mb connection and still it took him forever to download.

You picked the wrong day to try and install. iOS 5.1 was released yesterday and the Apple servers will be getting hammered as world+dog downloads the update.
You can create bootable installers for Lion; I have both DVD and USB ones. Instructions here:
http://osxdaily.com/2011/07/08/make-a-bootable-mac-os-x-10-7-lion-installer-from -a-usb-flash-drive/
http://osxdaily.com/2011/06/08/create-burn-bootable-mac-os-x-lion-install-disc/
It's also worth creating a Lion Recovery Assistant, in case your HDD hardware dies.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4848
I have the Recovery Assistant and the bootable installer on the same USB and it works well.

Similar Messages

Lion recovery didn't erase harddrive

Hey
I have a MacBook Pro, it's 6 months old and has since the beginning been slow but has progressively turned slower and slower. It is necessary to restart a lot as it chrashes down and stops working. Programmes that are especially difficult to work with is Mail, iPhoto (a lot!), Microsoft word/excel and Preview (even worse!). Opening a .pdf (no matter the size) takes a long time and it is required to double-click on the icon at least 3 times, before the .pdf is shown (Preview itself is open in the bar). After a lot of frustrating I send my MacBook to service and I was told to do a Lion Recovery, seeing as the repair guy started my macbook from a harddisk with a clean installation of Lion and it seemed to fix the problems. So, I followed the steps in Apples "About Lion Recovery" (using cmd + r), expecting it to wipe out the entire harddrive and leave my MacBook untouched as if I just unpacked it from the store. At least the service-guy told me that this would happen and this was the goal, seeing as I wanted to avoid a recovery based on for example a Time Machine backup that would keep settings and files. It turned out that all my files and application were still intact after the recovery, but seeing as it seemed to have fixed the problem, I was satisfied.
This turned out not to be the case - I have now used it for around 2 weeks and it started crashing down again. Same pattern, a lot of thinking - the rainbow-wheel seems to be there all the time, and a .pdf takes forever to open. Therefore I was wondering if someone could either guide me to how to make this clean installation of Lion or if there is another solution to my problems.
The reason for not using Time Machine is because my MacBook from the beginning (and thus also the Time Machine backup) is based on my old MacBook that had Snow Leopard as OS and I would like to avoid transferring my old settings etc. seeing as they may be causing my problems.
Thank you in advance!

Install or Reinstall Lion from Scratch
If possible backup your files to an external drive or second internal drive.
Boot to the Recovery HD:
Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.
Erase the hard drive:
Select Disk Utility from the main menu and click on the Continue button.
After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Erase button and wait until the process has completed.
Quit DU and return to the main menu.
Reinstall Lion: Select Reinstall Lion and click on the Install button.
Note: You can also re-download the Lion installer by opening the App Store application. Hold down the OPTION key and click on the Purchases icon in the toolbar. You should now see an active Install button to the right of your Lion purchase entry. There are situations in which this will not work. For example, if you are already booted into the Lion you originally purchased with your Apple ID or if an instance of the Lion installer is located anywhere on your computer.

What is Apple using to hide Lion Recovery, how can I duplicate it?

After installing Lion, it includes a recovery partition (Recovery HD). This partition is visible in the startup disk screen in the EFI (booting using option), however, it doesn't show up in finder, nor does it show up in Disk Utility (unless you have the debug menu, and enable show all partitions). Obviously it doesn't automount, that's one thing, but Apple is doing something to keep it from even showing up in disk utility.
Recently I upgraded my HDD in my Macbook Pro, I cloned it and so I lost the Lion Recovery utility. I've since added it back manually, and I'd like to place it in the same condition as it is when installed along side Lion (without having to go through migration on a fresh install, etc).
Does anyone know how to duplicate this state that the Lion Recovery HD is in?
I'm not really looking for alternatives - like reinstalling, etc, etc.. I'm also interested in the mechanism being used here.
Can anyone shed light?
Thanks!

I just found this outside thread:
Missing Recovery Partition After Cloning hard drive
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1153706
From post #7 there:
You can set it to Apple_Boot using gpt and this is indeed what hides it from GUI apps like disk utility. Apple_Boot is just a hidden version of Apple_HFS; the recovery partition is just an ordinary journaled HFS+ volume that can be manually mounted with diskutil mount disk0s3 (or whatever slice the recovery partition happens to be).
To change a GUID partition type to Apple_Boot one needs to know the UUID -- which for reference is 426F6F74-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC -- and remove the partition using gpt then re-add it with the desired type. This won't destroy the data of course, but one needs to make a note of the start and size values of the partition (as shown by gpt show) before the remove and then use them when re-adding. See the manual page for gpt.
From post #12 there:
Through some accidental research (don't ask…), I found that Lion's version of Disk Utility will also restore the Recovery HD partition when using DU's Restore to image a Lion Partition. I verified this several times. If there is no Recovery HD, it will recreate an existing one from the source HD to the destination, and will be positioned immediately following the Lion partition.
If no Recovery HD exists in the source, but does in the destination, it will leave the destination alone. For instance, if you have an image of a Lion partition, but for some reason, no Recovery partition, you can do a clean install of Lion on the destination - creating a Recovery partition - then restore your Lion image to the destination (replacing the clean install). It will leave the recovery partition alone at the destination.
If no Recovery HD exists in either source or destination, I don't believe DU will create one - this is one scenario I didn't test.

Lion Recovery from a Remote Time Machine Disk

I maintain the time machine backup for my MBP on a large USB drive hanging off of my Mac Mini. Yesterday I decided to upgrade the internal hard drive on my system to a faster, higher-capacity disk.   I assumed that this would be very straightfoward given I had a complete time machine backup. Time machine has saved my bacon many times. It was slightly trickier than I expected so I am publishing this recipe in the hope that it helps someone else trying to accomplish the same thing.
The instructions below are in the context of a hard drive replacement.   Skip to step 5 if you are just looking for the recovery instructions.
One last caveat, I have not tried this procedure over WIFI. I did my successful restore over a GigE hard line.   It may or may not work over Wifi and I would bet WIFI greatly increases the odds that something unexpected might go wrong and it will probably take many times longer as well.
YMMV. RTFM.   Good Luck.
Before you start you need the following things:
     A USB Drive that you don't mind erasing.
     A tiny phillips screwdriver
     A T4 torx driver
Step 0: Run Lion Recovery Disk Assistant
     * download this from apple support http://support.apple.com/kb/dl1433
     * this creates a USB stick that boots up the recover tools.
Step 1: Make sure time machine backup is up to date
Step 2: [paranoid] turn off time machine
Step 3: Cleanly shut down laptop
Step 4: Follow instructions in user manual to replace hard drive
     * you can download your laptop user manual here - http://support.apple.com/manuals/#macbookpro
     * this required a very tiny phillips head screwdriver and also a T4 torx screwdriver/bit
Step 4a: Be prudent: carefully save your old hard drive in case something goes wrong.
Step 5: Make sure laptop is on wall power
Step 6: Boot to recovery USB stick
     * insert the stick, hold down option while booting
Step 7: Select "Restore From Time Machine Backup"
     * When you get to the "Select a Backup Source" dialog you don't see your time machine share or any way to connect to a remote drive.
Step 8: Mount your remote backup
    Open Terminal ( Utilities | Terminal... )
    Run these commands:
        mkdir /Volumes/tm
        mount_afp afp://[username]:[password]@[name of host system].local/[name of remote disk] /Volumes/tm
        you need to supply all of the arguments in brackets above
             eg. mount_afp afp://fred:[email protected]/TimeMachine /Volumes/tm
        You can test if this succeeded by running
               ls /Volumes/tm
        If you see the files you expect, then you successfully mounted your remote disk.
        Now attach the sparsebundle that contains your remote system backup.
            hdiutil attach /Volumes/tm/[MyMachine].sparsebundle
        If this works when run "ls /Volumes" you should see a directory called "Time Machine Backups" in the list. Once that is done quit
        the terminal application. When you do this you should see "Time Machine Backups" listed in the "Select a Backup Source" dialog.
Step 9: Select "Time Machine Backups" from menu
Step 10: Select the backup in time ( probably the most recent one from 10 minutes ago! )
Step 11: Select destination disk
Step 12: If your destination disk does not appear, format it with disk utility
     Utilities | Disk Utility...
     Select your new unformatted drive
     Give your new drive a super duper clever name and then click Erase
     Quit Disk Utility
      Select your newly formatted and cleverly named root drive
Step 13: Go have some fun away from your computer., my system took about 4 hours to restore ~300GB.
Some number of hours later your system will reboot itself to the login screen and you will be good to go. Obviously don't do anything silly in the intervening time like
       * Unplugging your laptop
       * Turning off the system that hosts your time machine backup
       * Resetting your network router

Quick answers.
1. no
2. yes
3. no
Your only option is to install Lion onto the mini and then set up the other accounts.

EFI update 2.1 for lion recovery in Mountain lion

When the EFI update 2.1 for lion recovery in Mountain lion is done and when i restart my Macbook, the sleep indicator flashes and the machine makes a beeping sound for about 3 seconds and the machine starts up. Any thing to be worried about..? I beleive the the update is not installed bcoz it still shows in the App Store as update available. Pls advise.

MACBOOK 13 INCH MID 2010
OS X MOUNTAIN LION

How do I return my mid 2011 MacBook Air to Factory Specifications? Can I use the built in Lion recovery and wipe my data from the hard disk by reformatting it?

I want to trade in my old mid 2011 MacBook Air for a new MacBook Pro. After I have transferred my data to the new MacBook Pro, how do I reformat the hard disk to wipe all my data and return it to Factory specifications? Will the built in Lion recovery allow me to do this? I am currently running OS X Yosemite. Has the upgrade to Yosemite damaged or removed the original Lion recovery partition?

Click here and follow the instructions.
(124038)

Unable to install Lion Recovery Update v1.0 on Mac OS 10.8.2

Hi to anyone who can help,
As the "Find My Mac" option is greyed out, I followed all the instructions on the support forums on how to get this feature, such as Verify/Repair Machintosh HD using Disk Ultilty from the Recovery partition.
Subsequently I tried to install Lion Recovery Update v1.0 from the Apple Support link below:
http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1464
However, while attempting to install, it says "This update can only be installed on OS 10.7". How do I get this fixed?
Some background info, my MacBook Pro 15" (early 2011) had a replacement Hard Disk Drive and Logic Board.
1. The replacement drive had 10.7.4 installed, and I used the recovery partition to restore to a Time Machine Backup (which was 10.8.2).
2. Do I need to "download" the Mountain Lion package in the app store again? I see it as an available to download instead of saying "Installed".

Exit Code 6 is a generic error that indicates that the installation was not successful.
Have a look at the following document: http://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite/kb/errors-exit-code-6-exit.html
A quick look at the error log, indicates a permission issues. Are you logged in with an Administrator account and have sufficient privileges to install software?

Multiple TM Disks in Mountain Lion Recovery Console

I booted into the Mountain Lion Recovery Console for the very first time earlier this morning. I selected the option to recover from TM and to my suprise 5 TM disks were listed, referred to as Time Disk 1 to Time Machine Disk 5.
I originally created TM in a Mac OS partition on my 1Tb external desktop drive and outgrew that several months ago. I disabled TM, then copied the entire contents of the original TM partition to a new external drive, named the drive the same as the original, renamed the original partition, then re-enabled TM. Everything appeared to work seamlessly with TM continuing to operate without any problems.
When using TM from Mountain Lion, I can scan back until early June of this year, which is about right and I've successfully restored several personal files from several months back.
However, I'm now having doubts about my TM backups. Where does 5 separate TM virtual disks in Recovery Console come from? Should I do what presumably I ought to have done when I installed the new TM HD and start over from scratch?

I booted into the Mountain Lion Recovery Console for the very first time earlier this morning. I selected the option to recover from TM and to my suprise 5 TM disks were listed, referred to as Time Disk 1 to Time Machine Disk 5.
I originally created TM in a Mac OS partition on my 1Tb external desktop drive and outgrew that several months ago. I disabled TM, then copied the entire contents of the original TM partition to a new external drive, named the drive the same as the original, renamed the original partition, then re-enabled TM. Everything appeared to work seamlessly with TM continuing to operate without any problems.
When using TM from Mountain Lion, I can scan back until early June of this year, which is about right and I've successfully restored several personal files from several months back.
However, I'm now having doubts about my TM backups. Where does 5 separate TM virtual disks in Recovery Console come from? Should I do what presumably I ought to have done when I installed the new TM HD and start over from scratch?

How do I install a Lion Recovery Partition

I recently installed a new Hard Drive in my Early 2011 Macbook Pro, and I was wondering if there was any way I could out the Lion Recovery Partion on it.
Thanks In Advance

CCC Carbon Copy Cloner has a utility called "Disk Center" that is included with CCC that will create a Recovery Partition for you. I understand that CCC is not free, but it does have a free 30 day trial.
The "Disk Center" in CCC Carbon Copy Cloner is not obvious or easy to find, unless you know where to look for it (in the Window menu pulldown)... it's easy to miss. Once you find it in the CCC menu system, it is a quick (<5min) turnkey way to create a Recovery HD Partition on any disk, internal or external.
I thought I should share this, since I burned several hours of pain-staking research and experimentation in search of how to create/re-create a "Recovery HD" Partition for my MacBook Retina Mavericks laptop. My journey was varietal, including:
Successfully using a manual set of instructions with Terminal to execute a multi-step approach that worked ( http://www.macworld.com/article/2056561/how-to-make-a-bootable-mavericks-install -drive.html )
As well as a utility from musings.slivertooth.us that worked for me as advertised. Only problem is that while I appreciate and respect the great utility that guy created, my risk-averse nature prevents me from using a non-commercial utility to muck with the low-level details of my boot drive. Great job, but I prefer CCC since it's backed by a commercial SW company. Here's his great uility, as referenced in Apple discussion threads like this one: ( http://musings.silvertooth.us/2012/03/restoring-a-lost-recovery-partition-in-lio n/ )
Therefore, I was relieved to discover that CCC has a utility specifically designed to do this for me.
FYI: How did I find myself in this position? I lost my Recovery HD partition because I used Super Duper to Clone my HD/SSD, and subsequently restored my MacBook at one point. Super Duper has worked awesomely well for me for several years. It clones HDs/SSDs without a glitch, and makes them bootable automatically. The only gap or lack of function I have discovered is that "Super Duper" does not Clone the "Recovery HD" Partition. CCC Carbon Copy Cloner does. So, while I like Super Duper, I'm switching to CCC Carbon Copy Cloner for my backups from now on.
Disclaimer: I don't work for CCC. I'm just an I/T Professional that needed to figure out how to create/re-create a Recovery HD Partition...

Is there any way to recover files on a corrupted drive if I can book to Lion Recovery Assistant?

Is there anyway to recover files from a corrupted drive if I can boot to the on-disk Lion Recovery Assistant? Unfortunately Apple replaced my screen in December and wiped my hard drive. I restored my files from Time Machine but have not done a backup since December because Time Machine sees the computer as new. I started trying to find a way to reconnect to the existing backup with hopes of not having to do a full back up all over again. There are a number of files that I need from the last 2 months.
My mid-2009 17" MacBook Pro froze last night and I had to press the power button to turn it off. When the computer restarted, it boot into Lion Recovery Assistant. Disk Utility reported errors like "invalid b-tree node size" and "invalid record count".
- I restarted and ran fsck overnight. This morning I looked at the computer and it said that the drive could not be repaired.
- Genius Bar did a quick scan and said I needed a new hard drive.
- I called Apple Care and they had me start in Lion Recovery Assistant and run Disk Utility. Disk Utility again reported that the drive cannot be repaired.
- I tried using target disk mode and connected the MacBook to my iMac. The iMac can see the drive in Disk Utility but cannot mount it.
- I tried DiskWarrior from the iMac and it cannot rebuild the drive. It does not even attempt.
- I tried the demo of Data Rescue and it could not read the drive (using target disk mode).
I realized that if I can boot the computer to the Lion Recovery Assistant then the drive is still functional (corrupted but still functional). Disk Utility shows the custom name I assigned to the partition (I changed it from Macintosh HD).
Any suggestions?

I was finally able to recover my data using DiskWarrior!
After taking my laptop to a data recovery company and quoted $449 to recover my data, I decided to try one more time. The technician did a free diagnosis and said the drive was still functional. I explained everything that I tried. He said that they normally use Data Rescue and recommended that I wait a few minutes after starting the application before attempting to scan.
Using another computer, I installed Lion to a 16GB flash drive and installed DiskWarrior, Data Rescue, and Remo Recover. Remo Recover ran the day before for more than 24 hours and although it "saw" the data, the it only presented a fraction of the data I needed. I booted my laptop from the flash drive and first tried Data Rescue Demo. It estimated 3500 hours to scan a 500GB drive. That worked out to be about 145 days. I cancelled and tried DiskWarrior hoping that since I had purchased it, I would get some value. This time DiskWarror did the scan and in less than 90 minutes it found pretty much everything! It seems that it does not run properly with highly corrupted drives using target disk mode. At the end of the scan, it mounted my internal drive so that I could preview the rebuilt directories and copy what I needed to an external drive!

After upgrading to 10.7.2, my iMac works fine for 40-50 minutes, then slows to a crawl. Restart gets back to normal, then 40 minutes later need to restart again. Thought about reinstalling Lion through Lion Recovery, but says my hard disk is locked?

After upgrading to 10.7.2, my iMac works fine for 40-50 minutes, then slows to a crawl. Restart gets back to normal, then 40 minutes later need to restart again. Thought about reinstalling Lion through Lion Recovery, but won't let me, says my hard disk is locked? Any suggestions?

Launch the Terminal app in /Utilities/, run these two commands (copy & paste each one separately and hit the return key):
sudo chflags 0 /volumes/*
sudo chmod a+rx /volumes/*
at the Password: prompt, type in your admin password, carefully since nothing displays on the screen, and hit the return key. These should unlock your drives. You might have to restart.

Reformated hard drive and reinstalled lion still not able to use lion recovery asst.

I reformated my HD and reinstalled lion 10.7.1 and I am still unable to use the lion recovery assitstance app it's telling me no recovery partion?

I bought an external HDD to install the OS X Lion on it, then reformatted entire Macbook HDD, followed by restore image from external HDD to the Macbook build in HDD.
now the external HDD is a working Lion OX & Macbook also running smooths

Problem creating Mtn Lion Recovery partition on external drive.

USB external. Newly erased, three partitions: one 2GB for Recovery HD, other two backups of my old SL machine and new ML machine (Mini). Those work and their respective machines fine. Drive seems OK.
    Used Recovery Disk Asst v. 1.0 to create Recovery HD on the small partition while booted into 10.8.2 (the brand new Mini). Factory installed Mtn Lion Recovery HD exists on internal drive and it works— when starting with command-R or command-shift-R, not with Option key.     Install of Recovery HD to external seemed to go fine and doing a "diskutil list" in Terminal showed both the internal and external Recovery HD's, properly named as such.   However, when restarted with Option down the recovery partition showed up named the same as my internal— at that point "Macintosh HD" but later when I changed the internal's name, reinstalled the Recovery HD, and restarted with Option key the recovery partition now was named the same as new internal drive name.   Both times choosing the recovery partition resulted in booting into internal drive.
Was wondering if anyone had a similar problem— and found solution/reason.   Apple Tech Support particularly not helpful/knowledgeable on this subject.

Hi Baltwo
   Really appreciate the help.   Many thanks.     Finally seems to be working.     Not sure exactly what worked but in case you're interested I'll give you a, hopefully, short summary:
Using DU (after copy/paste of the command you wrote above into Terminal) I cloned the working internal drives RDH to the partition for it on the ext.   Failed— still seemed to work as almost an alias pointing at the boot volume on the internal.
So, erased the external again; didn't partition, did a reinstall of ML from DU while booted into RDH of internal. Then started from that new ML partition on external and let Setup Asst migrate everything over from the internal to keep Users/Permissions from being a problem.
    When that finished I tried to restart w option key.   Got a recovery HD that was called exactly that but, again, booted into internal boot drive.   Booted into internals RHD just to make sure it was OK and it was.
   For whatever reason again restarted w option key.   This time I got four choices: the boot volume of internal and external, an ext volume called Recovery HD (the trickster), and another volume called Recovery 10.8.3.   Something new— and, as Bill Murray said in Ground Hog Day, "anything new is good."   So I tried booting into that new RHD 10.8.3. (Note, I'm still running 10.8.2 on boot volumes.)
And that worked— booted into Recovery HD but no way that I could figure to see for sure that it was the Recovery HD on ext vs. on internal.   I think I need to activate the Debug menu on the RHD DU so I can choose the 10.8.3 recovery and see if I have the option of Repairing the disk or it's greyed out. If greyed, then proves I'm booted into it.   Might be a more elegant way to see that but it's the one I know.    Still, I assume I was in the RHD on the external.
Then made a second partition for the old mac's backup and that initially resulted in the boot volume of the internal backup not be mountable but after a restart or two testing the two RHD's, the mini decided to see all the volumes and things are, for the moment, copacetic.
Hope that wasn't too long and boring.    From my experience and reading on the 'net, my general sense is that there are a bunch of variables that all have to be right for this process to work. Probably less is more and just installing ML on a disk by itself will be the most reliable method, if most wasteful of data storage.
Regardless, couldn't have done it without you, baltwo.   I don't use this forum enough to know what the etiquette and protocols are but I marked all of your posts as useful, which they were, and, finally, as solving my issue, which they did.
Thanks again

How do I install just the Lion installer via the lion recovery partition.

I am trying to bootcamp windows 7 on my new macbook pro (early 2011), the installation was successfull but i am missing drivers on the windows side and cannot access the internet until i install them. I installed all the bootcamp updates and put them on a usb to transfer to windows partition but windows kept telling me i need an earlier version of bootcamp which is not available from the update support downloads section of the apple website.
After some research i realized i needed the mac boot disc for lion, which doesnt exist so i need to create my own. I was told i could install lion from the lion recovery partition.
here is my question....If i install lion onto my mac partition that currently has lion, can i stop the download after the initial 4 gb installer and not go through with the full re-installation of lion? so that i can then take the installesd.dmg (i think thats right) file and put it on a dvd to install from the windows partition and finally get the drivers i need to get it running.
Comment: based on what i have read on how you used to bootcamp a mac, apple has made it very difficult, unneccesarily difficult it seems.

Before you do anything else, I suggest a thorough read of this:
http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/boot_camp_install-setup_10.7.pdf

No Recovery - Mountain Lion won't install but Lion Recovery worked (until Mountain Lion messed it up).

When I tried to install Mountain Lion it gave me the "this disk does not support some features, like FileVault or Recovery Mode..." message. However, my Lion install at that point had a working Recovery Partition (I confirmed it after I got this first message - booted with it). I also have a cloned backup so I clicked continue. The install failed and gave the "No Recovery" message. Then I tried to boot in Recovery Mode and a screen came up saying "Installing" and the giant X with what looked like a progress bar with diagonal blue lines moving left to right, but no "time remaining" or other info indicating it was doing anything. I let this go on for about 10 or 15 minutes then restarted my computer. In Disk Utility I repaired permissions and disk repair was ok. I'm not using RAID or BootCamp - just one partition (plus the Lion Recovery one. The Mac is a newest model MacMini with an OWC SSD (I first thought the SSD might be the problem but it worked with Lion, so...)

Just Follow this procedure...
1. Go To BOOT CAMP and create a BLANK PARTITION. Say a minimum of 10 GB. You do not have to install anything on this.
2. After you create this, go back to ML installer and now you will see 2 HD's. one will be your main HD and the second one will be the one you just created.
3. Install the ML OS X on the main hard drive. Once installed, reboot the machine go to DISK UTILITY and delete the blank partition you had created.
4. So, now you have your HD at its full capacity.
Try this it should work.

Alternative Lion recovery?

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