[Linus]

So, interesting experience recently. I try to stay up-to-date on upgrades and OSes. Currently, my MacBook Pro is at Lion (and will likely be at Mountain Lion a week or two after release). Yesterday morning a new patch was released for Lion and I was one of the first to download and install it. Unfortunately for me, it had some bad code and completely trashed my OS. Now, I admit that I hadn't done a backup recently but I knew that was my own fault so didn't worry much about that. I was more concerned about having access to my laptop.

Well, something I wasn't aware was that not only does Lion have it's own little recovery partition, it also has it's own simple wireless driver and, if you need to, will do an in-place re-install of the OS (Operating system). To get to this press Command+R at boot. It took me a bit of time to find a stable wireless to use (I'm at a hotel this week -- big shock that wireless sucks here) but once it found that, it downloaded it, installed it and rebooted.

And I got all my data still intact, all the applications still working and I'm good as golden again. And I think I'll wait until I'm at home to do the update as it'll be easier from the home wireless if it continues to screw things up.