I have a 3rd generation MacBook Air running Snow Leopard that I wanted to upgrade to Lion via a clean install. To do this, I wanted to burn a DVD that I would be able to use on my other MacBook as well. There are many guides online (here’s a good one from Lifehacker: http://lifehacker.com/5823096/how-to-burn-your-own-lion-install-dvd-or-flash-drive), but I couldn’t get the DVD I burned to boot! I also found an InstallESD.dmg inside the InstallESD.dmg the guide says to burn, but this did not work for me as well. In the end, I ended up having to use the flash drive method. Good luck!
Here are the md5sums of the files I tried to burn:
InstallESD.dmg (external) 5a8bc4c636f35c855250c7b5508ae7a5 InstallESD.dmg (inside dmg above) 412cee9c4c77c04c9c8489c363a7e2e4
Christopher Baek 