'Lion Recovery' feature in Mac OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion

In the wake of complaints from various users about disk corruption and similar issues, Apple has provided an enhanced and easy-to-use Recovery System in the latest OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion. The feature provides easy access to a set of built-in utilities for reinstalling OS X, repairing your hard disk, and doing restoration from Time Machine backups. You can start the Recovery System by pressing the (Command+R) key combination at the time of booting the Mac. If the Recovery System successfully started, you will see the OS X menu bar and a 'Mac OS X Utilities' application window. In case you want to reinstall the OS X, you will need a proper Internet connection or a Wi-Fi network.

If the Recovery System in OS X Lion or OS X Mountain Lion fails to start, you can use another recovery option called 'OS X Internet Recovery'. This feature comes in handy when your hard drive stops working or you somehow fail to boot from the Recovery System. A few Mac models (that were introduced after the release of OS X Lion or OS X Mountain Lion) have the ability to automatically start OS X Internet Recovery after a Recovery System failure and boot the system directly from Apple servers. It will run a check to verify your memory and hard drive for ensuring that there is no likelihood of a system or hardware failure. You need to have at least 13 GB of free space for installing OS X Lion or OS X Mountain Lion and an Internet Restore partition.

The 'Recovery System' and 'OS X Internet Recovery' features are collectively referred to as 'Lion Recovery'.

Lion Recovery can be used to resolve a range of disk corruption errors, such as:

• 'Volume bitmap needs minor repair for orphaned blocks'
• 'Invalid volume free block count'
• 'The volume Macintosh HD was found corrupt and needs to be repaired.'     

With 'Recovery System' feature, you can either reinstall OS X on your hard drive or install it on an external storage device. The Lion Recovery Hard Drive partition is the first partition placed on your OS X disk. Generally, Apple hides this partition to prevent accidental modifications. Though these recovery options help to restore your system to a consistent state, there is no substitute for a good backup. Backing up important files and folders helps you easily recover from any serious data disaster and regain access to your lost files in no time.