Apple’s Lion Recovery Disk Assistant allows users to create a bootable recovery disk on an external hard drive (1 GB or larger). I have a 1TB external drive that I use for backing up my MacBook Pro. I figured that adding the recovery partition to this drive would make for a nice backup/recovery solution to have ‘just in case’.

When you run the Assistant, it will ask you which mounted external drive to use. There’s also a warning that it will erase any existing data from that drive.

I can live with that…I have backups of my backups.

The problem is that the partition that’s created is hidden. If I try to format or partition the drive to use the remaining free space, the hidden partition is overwritten.

Yeah…I know…this isn’t rocket science.

My solution: Using Disk Utility, create two partitions on the drive. Set the size of one of the partitions to 1 GB. Once those are created, launch the Assistant again and choose the 1GB partition as the drive to use for recovery. The Assistant will hide, format and copy the necessary files to the partition, leaving you with a partition to use for backups.