Installing a new hard drive without recovery discs

[saturnotaku]

My MBP came pre-installed with Lion, ergo no recovery media...just a hidden partition. If I were to replace the hard drive with an SSD at some point in the future, can I stick the old drive in my USB dock and access the recovery data that way to reinstall Lion on the new drive?

I'm assuming this is the case, but wouldn't want to go forward without confirmation.

[Geedub]

If you have wifi or are connected to your router via an ethernet cable, turn off laptop, hold down command + R and turn on computer, it takes a while and you will be greeted with a screen that gives you 4 choices. You can run disk utility and re-format your ssd/hd. And after formatting the drive, you can have lion downloaded and installed hands free.

[saturnotaku]

I was hoping to avoid having to re-download the entire operating system, hence why I want to know if booting from the recovery partition on the old drive is possible.

[Mr MM]

the recovery partition is actually tiny, and doesnt hold lion, just the software to download it.

If you have an apple store nearby you could actually go to the genius bar na ask for them to put lion for you.

The other option would be to make a USB drive with lion on it

[kornchild2002]

I think the best option would be to make a Time Machine backup of your system as-is. Then either make a bootable USB thumb drive with Lion on it or just go the download route. Then select the restore option using the Time Machine backup. Either way, unless you want to go to an Apple Store, you will have to download Lion as its installation files actually aren't on your computer.