Apple has posted details explaining how to use Lion Recovery to create an external recovery disk. The disk, according to Apple ‘has all of the same capabilities as the built-in Lion Recovery: reinstall Lion, repair the disk using Disk Utility, restore from a Time Machine backup, or browse the web with Safari.’
The disk used for external Lion Recovery can be either a USB thumb drive or USB hard drive. FireWire drives aren’t supported.
To create an external recovery disk, you’ll need to download the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant and follow the instructions after launching it.
Lion Recovery is built-in to OS X Lion and allows you to boot into a recovery partition on your Mac if you need to run Disk Utility to repair your hard drive, re-install Lion, or restore from a Time Machine back-up.
