How to create a 10.6.8 recovery CD (not clone of the OS or install environment) Upon Google searching people seem to equate "recovery CD" with full installation.  I have seen methods such as using Disk Utility with the Mac HD as the source and a DVD as the destination.  This clones the existing installation and I do not want that.

What I want is a minimal recovery environment just like the recovery partition but on a bootable CD.  The Macs that I am servicing do not have a recovery partition in place, if they did I'm sure I could disk util the source as the recovery partition and the destination as my CD.

I do not currently have the retail Snow Leopard DVDs.
Snow Leopard does not have a Recovery HD. That feature was introduced in OS X 10.7 Lion. You can't create Snow Leopard recovery disks either — that requires Lion too.

To create a bootable environment, you need to use the OS X installer. For this, you will need an install media to create the bootable partition. See:


How can I download Snow Leopard?