[ugh]

You guys are funny! ;-)

Pretty strange that Apple does something like this, they never did any kind of verification in the past.

I installed DP1 or DP2 on an empty disk using the DMG inside the app bundle and if I remember correctly (I might well not) there was no verification. Maybe it only kicks in when you install from the recovery partition? But why?

I completely forgot to check whether the GM install app still includes the installer DMG and I apparently can’t check anymore since that app was apparently deleted after I installed the update. That didn’t happen before. Since I’m nervous without that DMG I’m going to download Lion from the App Store again (that works but it takes time).

Edit: I just checked, the recovery partition is only 650MB. You are re-downloading the whole or large parts of the installer (3.75GB in size) when installing from the recovery partition. Apple checks whether you can re-download Lion. (The same happens when you re-download Lion from the App Store.)

I guess if you really want you can call this “activation” but I don’t really know how Apple should do it differently. Your Mac sends a request to a Server somewhere in order to download the installer. I’m fairly certain that without any activation it would be very simple to fake such a request and just download the installer at will. It would be no different from Apple putting Lion on a public server somewhere, for everyone to download. The only way to prevent this is – as far as I know – to do some kind of verification. What they could maybe do is to already put parts of the installer on the recovery partition, that way whatever is downloaded from Apple’s servers wouldn’t work without a recovery partition (which you can only get if you at one point had the Lion installer app). I’m, however, not sure that’s worth the trouble.

When you install from the installer app (I don’t know whether a clean install is possible if you do that, probably not) and when you install using the DMG inside the installer app bundle (it’s still there in the Lion GM) your installation is not verified.

That makes sense, I guess.

[mishmash]

>..I don’t really know how Apple should do it differently.

My preference would be to just stuff the other 3GB on the recovery partition.

[ugh]

I would recommend you get the DMG inside the Lion installer app and put it on some bootable medium (DVD, USB drive, …), that way you don’t have to worry about it.

Here is where you can find it:

Open up the Lion installer app bundle and go to Contents ▸ SharedSupport. InstallESD.dmg is what you want. Copy it somewhere. You can create a bootable install partition with Disk Utility.

I’m also gonna do that, if only to have my peace of mind. I guess I would prefer it if Apple gave us some way to just download the DMG but what they have done is pretty much the next best thing. (The whole installer app is, in fact, only a thin wrapper around the DMG.)

[wmf]

That does seem simpler, but I guess a 4GB recovery partition on a 64GB SSD would be pretty wasteful.

[aaronbrethorst]

The GM installer still contains a DMG.