can you make a recovery drive from an operating system disk
The Recovery Disk Assistant lets you create a Recovery System on an external drive that has all of the same capabilities as the built-in Recovery System. Recovery Disk Assistant is provided for use with Macs using OS X Lion or OS X Mountain Lion. With Recovery Disk Assistant, you can create a Recovery System on an external drive that allows you to reinstall OS X, repair the disk using Disk Utility, restore from a Time Machine backup, or browse the web with Safari.