OS-X Lion Internet Recovery and Wireless Networks

By Akbar • July 6th, 2012

Apple OS-X Internet Recovery Apple’s new Internet Recovery feature is really cool to hear and use, and I haven’t thought of using it soon. However, we recently purchased new iMacs for the office, and after the Windows 7 installation one one of the iMac, when trying to resize the bootcamp partition, something went wrong, and not only we lost the OS-X lion partition, but it also removed the OS-X Recovery partition.

Now the Internet Recovery was the only option, but we were having one serious issue and that was the boot loader was not finding our Wireless Network. It was finding couple of other open and secured Wireless Networks in the neighboring offices, but not the one we were using in our office. What confused me most was that in the other iMac of same batch and model, the office Wireless Network was visible and can be connected without any issue. It was only the Internet Recovery boot loader which was having problem finding and connecting with the office network.

We tried various options like:
– Changing the Network Name
– Changing the Network Channel
– Changing the WEP Security Keys

At the end, we found the issue, and that was for the Internet Recovery, you can’t connect with a Wireless Network which is using the WEP Security Protocol. It must be either using WPA or WPA2 security protocol. This makes some sense too, because WEP is vulnerable protocol, and can be easily broken, and is not recommended. So Apple guys want to be safe when connecting user with their network.

However, ironically, it did allow Internet Recovery on the Wireless Network with no security at all. I’m not a Wireless security expert, so may be there is some catch in it; but it sounds funny to me. Plus it allows recovery using the Wireless Network only, but it can’t use the Ethernet Network for this. May be there is some catch in this too 🙂

BTW, here is the Apple technical write-up on the OS-X Internet Recovery. This might be handy, in case you are having some problems using the Internet Recovery feature:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718

Update 07/10/2012 – After two days of trying various option, we were finally able to install OS-X on that machine. The technique which worked well was to create the USB Bootable disk. The following PC Magazine article cover this technique in detail:
How to Make Your Own Apple OS X Lion Bootable USB Key

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 6th, 2012 at 1:33 am and is filed under OS X. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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