Apple has just released Lion Recovery Disk Assistant. Lion Recovery Disk Assistant allows user to create an external drive for recovery.

The tool  installs the Lion Recovery partition to external media so you can create another boot disk so you can reinstall Lion, repair the disk using Disk Utility, restore from a Time Machine backup, or browse the web with Safari. Created an external drive for recovery also can be used in the event you cannot start your computer with the built-in Recovery HD, or you have replaced the hard drive with a new one that does not have Mac OS X installed.

In release note Apple says “The Lion Recovery Disk Assistant will erase all data on the external drive when creating the Recovery HD. You should either backup your data before running the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, or create a new partition on the external drive”.

To create the Recovery Disk Assistant, you will need to plug in an external hard drive with at least 1GB of free space, then run the assistant to create the recovery drive and follow the on screen instructions.

When the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant completes, the new partition will not be visible in the Finder or Disk Utility. To access the external Recovery HD, connect the drive, then restart the computer and hold the Option key. Select Recovery HD from the Startup Manager.

Lion Recovery Disk Assistant requires :

• A Mac running OS X Lion with an existing Recovery HD
• An external USB hard drive or thumb drive with at least 1GB of free space

Notes :

• If the computer shipped with Lion, the external recovery drive can only be used with the system that created it.
•  If the system was upgraded from Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard to Lion, the external recovery drive can be used with other systems that were upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion.

You can download Lion Recovery Dist Assistant from here.

Thanks Jay!