Booting Lion Recovery Assistant From Thumb Drive

I'm wondering if I can boot the Lion "Recovery Disk Assitant" from a USB thumb drive with an early 2008 MacBook Pro with an installed but unformatted hard drive. I do have a Time Machine backup to finish the job. I'm not sure the laptop's firmware will allow a USB boot up with the thumb drive. Does anyone know if that should be a problem? I'm assuming the "Recovery Disk Assistant" would take care of the formatting and get me started. The old hard drive is working but I need more capacity. I want the new drive to have the recovery partition so I am concerned about losing it if I were to clone the old hard drive which also has a cloned bootcamp partition. I would rather be sure by letting the new Lion installation take care of partioning issues.

The OP has a 2008 MBP, which is not new enough for this.
Lion Internet recovery in the absence of a recovery partition on disk has to be done via the Mac's firmware. All new Macs have this capability, and there are EFI firmware updates available for a number 2010 and 2011 Macs, but there is no such EFI firmware update available for a 2008 MBP.
from
Computers that can be upgraded to use Lion Internet Recovery
MacBook Pro (13-inch, Early 2011)
MacBook Pro (15-inch, Early 2011)
MacBook Pro (17-inch, Early 2011)
iMac (21.5-inch, Mid 2011)
iMac (27-inch, Mid 2011)
MacBook (13-inch, Mid 2010)
MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2010)
Mac mini (Mid 2010)
MacBook Pro (15-inch and 17-inch, Mid 2010)
iMac (21.5-inch and 27-inch, Mid 2010)
MacBook Air (11-inch and 13-inch, Late 2010)

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