How to find the Lion installation image on the iMac?

Question

I recently bought Lion for $29.99 for my iMac on the App Store, and now want to burn a disc so that I can make another white Macbook that has Snow Leopard dual boot to Lion as well (Apple allows installing Lion on more than one machine that a user owns). Also, I wanted to create a disc so that if there is an need in the future, there is a disc to boot to.

But I followed the instructions on

http://osxdaily.com/2011/06/08/create-burn-bootable-mac-os-x-lion-install-disc/

http://osxdaily.com/2011/07/08/make-a-bootable-mac-os-x-10-7-lion-installer-from-a-usb-flash-drive/

which are both linked from Can I dual boot Snow Leopard and Lion?

and the InstallESD.dmg file cannot be found. In fact, if I type dmg in the Finder's search box, and chose "Disc Image" (kind / type), the whole hard disk doesn't have a file that is more than 90MB in size. If I go to the Applications folder, the largest size shown is merely 495MB...

How can this be solved? thanks.

Answer 1

When you buy Lion from the App Store, it downloads an application named Install Mac OS X Lion to your Applications folder. InstallESD.dmg is hidden inside this application. Since it's hidden, a Spotlight search normally won't show it; you need to find the installer application, right-click on it, choose Show Package Contents, and then navigate to the image inside it (both links have instructions for this).

There is one more complication: when you run the Lion installer application, it installs Lion and then deletes the installer. But you can re-download it if you know the trick: open the App Store, Option-click on the Purchases icon in the toolbar, and you should have a Download button available for OS X Lion.