Cannot install Lion on External Hard Drive

I have a brand new ssd in a hard drive enclosure and want to put lion on it before I install it into the computer, taking out the old hard drive (with SL on it). I got it from the app store, it installs until it has to restart, and then after it restarts and is installing is says cannot install because it cant create a recovery partition or something like that. How can I do this? Do I need to install the empty ssd, then have lion on a bootable usb and install from there? Thanks in advance.

Carbon Copy Cloner will make a bootable external drive.  The old version is shareware if you can download it, the new version is commercial.  It is a great program.  I have been using it for years back to a G4.  Many backups do not create a bootable drive.

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