Is it possible to configure (or trick) internet recovery to load Lion instead of Mountain Lion? I have two machines this week that I needed to install Lion on and both were shipped with Lion and subsequently upgraded to Mountain Lion.

I tried wiping the drives, but Internet Recovery only offers a choice to download and install Mountain Lion. Is there a way to get Lion reinstalled instead?

I tried running the Install Mac OS X Lion app that I saved when I was using it to upgrade several Snow Leopard Macs to Lion last summer - but Apple has built in a check to prevent me from installing Lion onto an external drive while my mac currently runs Mountain Lion.



Is there an elegant way to instal Lion without needing a bootable Lion system to re-run the Lion installer (or download it from Internet Recovery)?
Yes - you can download the OS X Recovery Disk Assistant v1.0 and write a Lion specific Recovery HD to an USB drive with 1 GB of space on it. This will erase whatever information is on the USB partition, but then you can boot to a Lion Recovery HD and re-install Lion even if the Mac has Mountain Lion installed.