Apple Giving Free Flash Drives to Customers Bitten by the Lion

Apple hit a snag recently when its OS X Lion ended up injuring the hard disk drives of some customers, so the Cupertino-based company decided to make amends by shipping some complimentary flash drive units over to those affected.

Software updates are usually a cause to rejoice, but that is not the reaction that the OS X Lion stirred in Apple customers when it came out recently.

Basically, the software caused hard disk drive failure and made it impossible to access the recovery partition to restore the Lion to the factory state.

This, naturally, did not sit well with anyone involved, and it appears that the company made haste in setting up a plan of action.

What the Cupertino-based corporation did was make a number of special-purpose flash drive units loaded with the rescue image necessary to resolve the matter.

There are some requirements that users will have to meet before being shipped one of these items fro free, however.

First, all the built-in recovery tools of the Lion need to have been tried, particularly Internet Recovery.

Once this condition is met, Tier 2 tech support personnel has to clear the request before Apple will send over the USB recovery flash drive.

Of course, users can still get the drive even if they do not fulfill these conditions but, in that case, they will need to be willing to part with the sum of $69, as reported by the folks over at 9to5mac.

Oddly enough, that price is more than twice as high as the one requested for the fresh download of the Mac OS X lion itself from the App Store (it goes for US$29).

Fortunately, provided one has an empty USB stick, it is possible to create one's own install drive, with the help of basic tools that come with Mac OS X.