Q: Why my Mountain Lion recovery partition cannot boot ?
Hi
I cannot boot from the recovery partition on Mountain Lion.
I am only offered Internet Recovery - which is slow.
I installed Mountain Lion from scratch on my Mid-2010 macbook pro.
I was running Lion, got the Mountain Lion app from the app store and created an USB stick
I have no bootcamp but enabled filevault after installation.
The recovery HD appears to be there and to be ok - see output below.
So why am I forced into Interent Recovery?
Can I 'recover' the Recovery partition ?
Edoardos-MacBook-Pro:~ edoardo$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *500.1 GB disk0
1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_CoreStorage 499.2 GB disk0s2
3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3
/dev/disk1
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: Apple_HFS MacOSX *498.9 GB disk1
Using the DiskUtility debug option:
defaults write com.apple.DiskUtility DUDebugMenuEnabled 1
I can even mount it and list its contents:
Edoardos-MacBook-Pro:~ edoardo$ ls -la /Volumes/
MacOSX/ Recovery HD/
Edoardos-MacBook-Pro:~ edoardo$ ls -la /Volumes/Recovery\ HD/
total 0
drwxrwxr-x 11 root wheel 442 31 Jul 23:00 .
drwxrwxrwt@ 4 root admin 136 2 Aug 13:19 ..
drwxrwxrwt@ 3 root wheel 102 31 Jul 11:54 .TemporaryItems
d-wx-wx-wt 3 root wheel 102 2 Aug 13:19 .Trashes
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 31 Jul 11:54 .fseventsd
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 0 31 Jul 11:54 .metadata_never_index
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 31 Jul 12:38 System
drwxr-xr-x 5 root wheel 170 31 Jul 23:00 com.apple.boot.S
drwxr-xr-x 10 root wheel 340 31 Jul 11:54 com.apple.recovery.boot
Edoardos-MacBook-Pro:~ edoardo$ diskutil info disk0s3
Device Identifier: disk0s3
Device Node: /dev/disk0s3
Part of Whole: disk0
Device / Media Name: Recovery HD
Volume Name: Recovery HD
Escaped with Unicode: Recovery%FF%FE%20%00HD
Mounted: Yes
Mount Point: /Volumes/Recovery HD
Escaped with Unicode: /Volumes/Recovery%FF%FE%20%00HD
File System Personality: Journaled HFS+
Type (Bundle): hfs
Name (User Visible): Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
Journal: Journal size 8192 KB at offset 0x7000
Owners: Enabled
Partition Type: Apple_Boot
OS Can Be Installed: Yes
Media Type: Generic
Protocol: SATA
SMART Status: Verified
Volume UUID: 2FB278E4-2FC8-3CCB-8F6A-4EF280037F15
Total Size: 650.0 MB (650002432 Bytes) (exactly 1269536 512-Byte-Blocks)
Volume Free Space: 125.0 MB (125001728 Bytes) (exactly 244144 512-Byte-Blocks)
Device Block Size: 512 Bytes
Read-Only Media: No
Read-Only Volume: No
Ejectable: No
Whole: No
Internal: Yes
Solid State: No
MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion
Posted on Aug 2, 2012 5:37 AM
Followed this article for Lion
If your system initially had a recovery partition but after cloning and formatting it is no longer available, then one method of getting it back is to simply download and reinstall Lion from the Mac App Store. Doing this should keep your data and installed applications intact, but result in a fresh local Recovery HD partition installed along side your OS installation.
So I *redownloaded* the ML installer from the AppStore and reinstalled it.
This was obviously long but
- All my user data apps and settings seem effectively untouched
- I still have FileVault2 and the Firmware password set
- I can quickly boot in recovery without an internet connection (with CMD-R)
So although lengthy this is a decent solution.
I suspect that turning fileValut2 on on the original install screwed the Recovery HD - this must be a ML bug.
There should be quicker ways of just rebuilding the Recovery partition
this article shows steps for Lion
I just did not want to attempt something untested for ML.
thanks all for your suggestions anyway.
cheers.
Posted on Aug 2, 2012 8:49 AM