This small hint may be of some help when you have to reinstall OS X from a recovery partition in a network environment that does not have an active DHCP server. In this case, a small intervention in the Terminal is required.
Once you’ve booted into the Recovery partition, open Terminal by clicking its icon in the Utilities menu. Then:
- Get a list of the network interfaces for the Mac you are installing Lion on:
networksetup -listallnetworkservices
- Set up the network interface, as listed by the output of the command mentioned above (Ethernet or otherwise):
networksetup -setmanual {INTERFACE NAME} {IP ADDRESS} {SUBNET MASK} {ROUTER}
- Set the name (DNS) servers:
networksetup -setdnsservers {INTERFACE NAME} {YOUR DNS SERVER}
- Verify that the changes have been correctly saved:
ifconfig
- Examine all the entries and find the one you have actually worked on (ex. en0 is generally, but not always Ethernet).
- Quit Terminal and continue with your installation by following the onscreen steps.
- Wait for the download to finish
- Enjoy