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"Internet Recovery. Help is everywhere. If your Mac problem is a little less common — your hard drive has failed or you’ve installed a hard drive without OS X,

"Internet Recovery. Help is everywhere. If your Mac problem is a little less common — your hard drive has failed or you’ve installed a hard drive without OS X, for example — Internet Recovery takes over automatically. It downloads and starts Lion Recovery directly from Apple servers over a broadband Internet connection. And your Mac has access to the same Lion Recovery features online. Internet Recovery is built into every newly-released Mac starting with the Mac mini and MacBook Air." Anyone wanna guess how that mechanism works? Micro kernel on some internal flash memory?

TwistedWeasel 15y ago
It must be something small like that, nothing stored on the HD. I wonder if it pulls down enough to create a recovery partition and then boots into that?
lobo_tuerto 15y ago
"...or you’ve installed a hard drive without OS X, for example — Internet Recovery takes over automatically" Could a dual boot system (Lion + Ubuntu) be confused with "hard drive without OS X" and be taken over by the Lion Recovery automatically? Hope this doesn't means that only OS X should be installed in a Mac.
- matthewlyle 15y ago
  I doubt it, since Boot Camp is a native OS X feature.
  - natesm 15y ago
    Boot Camp only allows for one other OS. Back when I tri-booted, I had to do it all manually (and use refit). Boot Camp had no idea what was going on.
- ceejayoz 15y ago
  I'd imagine they're targeting more the situation of "I bought a new, blank hard drive".
russell_h 15y ago
Not sure how this one works, but Macs have had a thing called NetBoot[1] for quite a while which does almost exactly what Apple is describing now. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBoot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBoot
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
EricButler 15y ago
I haven't used this myself, but the Macbook Air has always been able to boot from a remote DVD drive straight from EFI. http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10329287-263.html?tag=mfiredir http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10329287-263.html?tag=m... Perhaps this works in a similar way?
chc 15y ago
I'm not sure if this is anything different from the Recovery partition that Lion installs on all Macs. If it's the same thing, there's basically just a small partition with a very minimal OS X install that you can boot into if your main system is hosed to reinstall the system software from Apple's servers.
- fredoliveira 15y ago
  I'm not sure who's down-voting you, but your answer is correct. It is indeed the recovery partition. It includes a compressed lion system tree with Safari.
  - riffraff 15y ago
    it should not: "your hard drive has failed or you’ve installed a hard drive without OS X, for example ". I know apple is deceiving, but I can't guess how they would install a recovery partition a new "drive without osx".
    - chc 15y ago
      Ah, thank you for calling my attention to that. I had somehow read it to mean "If your boot partition is hosed."
  - jevinskie 15y ago
    It is not. The page states it works with a blank drive. It is built into the EFI firmware.
colinprince 15y ago
Lot's of info in John Siracusa's exhaustive review on page 2: http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7.ars/2 http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7.a...
- aikinai 15y ago
  That's the standard recovery partition, but you'll still need a working hard drive to boot from that. Internet Recovery doesn't even require a working hard drive, so it's an entirely different system.
ryannielsen 15y ago
I'd imagine Internet Recovery is simply an EFI application stored in the Mac's firmware, and that the app itself is an extension of the pre-existing NetBoot/NetInstall concept that supports http and does some machine and dmg verification.
ThrowAway0720 15y ago
It probably works the same way that WANboot works on Sun/Oracle SPARC machines: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E19683-01/817-5768/wanbootexamples-1/index.html http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E19683-01/817-5768/wanboo... There's just enough code to initialize the network interface/s, grab an IP, and download a file from an HTTP/S server. Once the file is downloaded, it's executed and you have the beginnings of a bootstrap procedure for your OS installer. WANbooting has been around for almost ten years now, so the idea isn't that new. This was probably even technically possible with PowerPC machines, as they used OpenBoot firmware just like Sun SPARC machines did. I guess they wrote the EFI code necessary to do the same thing.
angrycoder 15y ago
It's Apple, so I would assume... fairies?

TwistedWeasel 15y ago

It must be something small like that, nothing stored on the HD. I wonder if it pulls down enough to create a recovery partition and then boots into that?

lobo_tuerto 15y ago

"...or you’ve installed a hard drive without OS X, for example — Internet Recovery takes over automatically" Could a dual boot system (Lion + Ubuntu) be confused with "hard drive without OS X" and be taken over by the Lion Recovery automatically? Hope this doesn't means that only OS X should be installed in a Mac.

matthewlyle 15y ago
I doubt it, since Boot Camp is a native OS X feature.
- natesm 15y ago
  Boot Camp only allows for one other OS. Back when I tri-booted, I had to do it all manually (and use refit). Boot Camp had no idea what was going on.
ceejayoz 15y ago
I'd imagine they're targeting more the situation of "I bought a new, blank hard drive".

russell_h 15y ago

Not sure how this one works, but Macs have had a thing called NetBoot[1] for quite a while which does almost exactly what Apple is describing now. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBoot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBoot

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

EricButler 15y ago

I haven't used this myself, but the Macbook Air has always been able to boot from a remote DVD drive straight from EFI. http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10329287-263.html?tag=mfiredir http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10329287-263.html?tag=m... Perhaps this works in a similar way?

chc 15y ago

I'm not sure if this is anything different from the Recovery partition that Lion installs on all Macs. If it's the same thing, there's basically just a small partition with a very minimal OS X install that you can boot into if your main system is hosed to reinstall the system software from Apple's servers.

fredoliveira 15y ago
I'm not sure who's down-voting you, but your answer is correct. It is indeed the recovery partition. It includes a compressed lion system tree with Safari.
- riffraff 15y ago
  it should not: "your hard drive has failed or you’ve installed a hard drive without OS X, for example ". I know apple is deceiving, but I can't guess how they would install a recovery partition a new "drive without osx".
  - chc 15y ago
    Ah, thank you for calling my attention to that. I had somehow read it to mean "If your boot partition is hosed."
- jevinskie 15y ago
  It is not. The page states it works with a blank drive. It is built into the EFI firmware.

colinprince 15y ago

Lot's of info in John Siracusa's exhaustive review on page 2: http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7.ars/2 http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7.a...

aikinai 15y ago
That's the standard recovery partition, but you'll still need a working hard drive to boot from that. Internet Recovery doesn't even require a working hard drive, so it's an entirely different system.

ryannielsen 15y ago

I'd imagine Internet Recovery is simply an EFI application stored in the Mac's firmware, and that the app itself is an extension of the pre-existing NetBoot/NetInstall concept that supports http and does some machine and dmg verification.

ThrowAway0720 15y ago

It probably works the same way that WANboot works on Sun/Oracle SPARC machines: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E19683-01/817-5768/wanbootexamples-1/index.html http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E19683-01/817-5768/wanboo... There's just enough code to initialize the network interface/s, grab an IP, and download a file from an HTTP/S server. Once the file is downloaded, it's executed and you have the beginnings of a bootstrap procedure for your OS installer. WANbooting has been around for almost ten years now, so the idea isn't that new. This was probably even technically possible with PowerPC machines, as they used OpenBoot firmware just like Sun SPARC machines did. I guess they wrote the EFI code necessary to do the same thing.

angrycoder 15y ago

It's Apple, so I would assume... fairies?