[dnanian]

I'm not a fan of this approach, no. For one thing, it's a case where copying one volume would somehow copy another, which is a bad idea.

For another, Apple hasn't yet provided guidance for a supported method of copying the recovery partition. While I do know "how" to do it, the method I'd use is not explicitly endorsed, and as such I don't think it necessarily wise.

Reinstalling Lion (you can create a recovery disk thumbdrive) is the one way that Apple seems to support which is why, right now, that's the way we're doing it. It also ensures that the 'new' recovery partition has the most recent data on it.

This is a frustrating issue. I recognize that it's inconvenient in some situations, but we stil don't have a "good" (eg "supported") way of accomplishing the task. And I don't want to put in something that might cause trouble with an OS update, minor or major, or unexpected behavior due to going "around" the existing method.

Now, the 'unsupported' method is only unsupported in the sense that the copy is done at a low level, the partition maps have to be adjusted, partitions created, hidden, named, etc. But while I know how, of course, building that kind of thing in makes me nervous for the reasons mentioned above.

Anyway, still thinking about it...