Steps 1 through 4 in this slideshow to properly format the drive.

This drive must be at least 5GB in size (an 8GB flash drive works well), and it must be formatted with a GUID Partition Table.

Connect to your Mac the hard drive or flash drive you want to use for your bootable Lion installer.

Drag the Mac OS X Install ESD icon into the Source field on the right (if it isn’t already there).

Click Mac OS X Install ESD in Disk Utility’s sidebar, then click the Restore button in the main part of the window.

The mounted volume is called Mac OS X Install ESD.

This mounts the disk image’s volume in the Finder.

In Disk Utility, select InstallESD.dmg in the sidebar, and then click the Open button in the toolbar.

To create a bootable hard drive or flash drive I recommend a hard drive or flash drive-a DVD will work, but it takes a long time to boot and install. The next steps depend on whether you want to create a bootable hard drive or flash drive, or a bootable DVD. Right-click (or Control+click) on the Lion installer to view its contents.

Drag the InstallESD.dmg disk image into Disk Utility’s left-hand sidebar.

Launch Disk Utility (in /Applications/Utilities).

In the folder that appears, open Contents, then open Shared Support you’ll see a disk-image file called InstallESD.dmg.

Right-click (or Control+click) the installer, and choose Show Package Contents from the resulting contextual menu.

It’s called Install Mac OS X Lion.app and it should have been downloaded to /Applications.

Once you’ve purchased Lion, find the Lion installer on your Mac.

Provided instructions for creating a bootable Lion-install drive for newer Macs. If your only Mac was released after Lion, so you can’t download the Lion installer from the Mac App Store, I’ve also So if you create a bootable Lion-installer drive using the current version of the Lion installer-which, as of, installs OS X 10.7.3-that drive will work with all current Lion-capable Macs. However, unlike with the CD- and DVD-based Mac OS X installers of old, Apple can-and does-update the Mac App Store version of the Lion installer. Update: When this article was originally published, the Mac App Store version of Lion would not boot any Macs released in mid-2011 or later, as those models shipped with a newer version of Lion preinstalled.

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