Trying to make an OSX recovery flash drive

I have the relevant guides and have a GUID partitioned 8GB flash drive.
But when I go to the Apple store and use option + click on Purchases no Mac installer is there. Is this because I am using a brand new rMBP that came with 10.8.2? Do I need to do something different?
Thanks

If Mountain Lion came pre-installed on your Retina MBP you will not see an option for a free download from the Mac App store.

Oh I see.
If I'd upgraded to 10.8.2 I could get it but not when it came pre-installed? So is there no way for me to get the installer then?
Thanks.

I'm really not sure how you would go about getting a downloaded copy. It might be that you have to pay for it. If that's what you need to do, it sells for $19.99 US (convert that to UK pounds). Once you've download it, it's a very simple procedure to create a bootable flash drive. It took me all of 5 minutes to create one on an 8 GB flash drive.

Perhaps someone here has some experience with it and will chime in....

Ok that's not too bad then. Thanks for your help chscag.

Would the paid for version (£13-99 incidentally) be the same as the version pre-installed on this rMBP?

Yes, the versions are the same. You may have to run software update after downloading it in order to get to 10.8.2, but that won't really matter anyway if all you intend to use it for is an installer.

Ok that's good enough for a fallback.
I'll hang around for a while and see if any other ideas come along for grabbing the installer but paying for another isn't the end of the world at that price
Thanks again chscag

Well to disagree ever so slightly with the learned chscag, I purchased a new iMac in late June 2012 and got a free upgrade to Mountain Lion from Apple. I made a USB thumb drive no problem, but Apple did warn the version I downloaded free of charge would only work with an iMac. Don't know what the difference might be, other than drivers suitable for iMac and not general drivers for all models.

You have Recovery, so perhaps the go will be to download OS X.9, whenever it may be released and burn that to the thumb drive. We will be advised when released the size of the thumb drive required. Have just gone through installing Disk Warrior and TechToolPro v. 6 to thumb drives. The latter required a 32GB thumb drive!

Thanks harryb2448.
As the recovery partition doesn't include the installer (as such) and having Googled around a fair bit I decided to buy a new full version. I downloaded it overnight (actually the first download failed at 1.4GB but after signing in to Apple store again it continued ok) and I made an installer flash drive this morning.
I'm pleased to report that it boots ok, which is good

For the £13-99 price it seemed like a good idea

Yes MacDuck it is a great idea. Now if you have an external drive consider cloning with SuperDuper and keeping up to date with weekly Smart Update which just makes changes to whatever has happened during the week. With the USB thumb drive you really don't need the Recovery partitoopn on the cloned drive.

harryb2448 I have an external drive named the Tardis but I'm using that for TM backups. They will have everything I need to recover won't they?

I have used cloning systems before but to be honest I've had very mixed results and at the time of using them it's too late to find out they don't work!
Mind you I've heard of TM backups not restoring as well.
Any advice in that area?

SD works well. Your external needs to be formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled) in Disk Utility and GUID selected under Partition.

Ok thanks. Have installed SD and will have a look. External HDD is formatted correctly (I think it had to be for TM backups).
I've used Clonezilla many times. It's handy as you can boot the iso directly from the grub menu. Not sure if it's ok with OS X though.

Carbon Copy Cloner is the recommended tool to use with either Lion or Mountain Lion as SuperDuper does not clone the recovery partition, while CCC does.

Ahh but with the USB thumb drive SD with Smart Backup is my preferred option. With no thumb drive CCC for sure.

I've been cloning my boot drives periodically since at least 2002. In all that time I only recall having two clones fail. One would not recognize my login password so I could not get into my own machine. The other "failed" clone actually worked though several files/folders were now visible when they should have been invisible.

I don't update the clones weekly but certainly do before any major changes. I also don't clone data since I use TM for that.

I don't update the clones weekly but certainly do before any major changes. I also don't clone data since I use TM for that.

Click to expand...

I make a TM backup and a CCC backup together, usually every three days or whenever I do a major upgrade or installation of software. I use two separate hard drives for the backups.

Thanks for all the info people! Plenty for me to go on there