You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!
When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.
When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.
My Mac Pro will not start into recovery mode. In fact, it will not start into any of the startup key combinations: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201255
I am using a wired Mac keyboard.
The current start-up drive is an SSD on a PCI board. I notice that it does not have a recovery partition.
I'm trying to pass it along to a friend and want to give him a clean machine.
OS is High Sierra.
Help please ...
Mac Pro, macOS 10.13
Using CCC, I created a bootable disk by cloning the SSD to one of the spinning drives. Interestingly, as part of the cloning process, CCC asked if I wanted to create a "missing Recovery Partition".
I changed the start-up disk to the cloned drive and was able to restart the Mac in Recovery Mode.
Now I need to reverse the process and clone the spinning disk on the SSD.
Fingers crossed that it will also create the Recovery Partition.
Using CCC, I created a bootable disk by cloning the SSD to one of the spinning drives. Interestingly, as part of the cloning process, CCC asked if I wanted to create a "missing Recovery Partition".
I changed the start-up disk to the cloned drive and was able to restart the Mac in Recovery Mode.
Now I need to reverse the process and clone the spinning disk on the SSD.
Fingers crossed that it will also create the Recovery Partition.
well, Davis Ris, all I can recommend for now is that if you have access to another Mac or even a PC and you have a USB flash or thumb drive of at least 8 gig size/capacity, that you try to make a boot-able Mac USB flash drive. There are various utilities on the Mac side of things, eg DiskMaker X, etc, and there might be a few on the PC side.... but then again, I've never tried to make a boot-able Mac USB flash drive on a PC, but I've been told that is is possible..... you may wish to boot up, holding down the "D" key for Apple Diagnostics which should run some basic tests..... you should also try resetting the smc/pmu and zapping the pram as well....before trying recovery mode. Also, there's a pram battery behind the graphics card......it's a little button cell. It's a CR-2032/BR-2032 battery and it goes in plus side up. these batteries do fail after about 5 years, it's a bit of a crap-shoot, but if you have a dead pram battery, it may affect startup....... a new battery is about $6,, so it's worth a try..... I hate to say it, David Ris, but SSD's and hard drives can and do fail without warning..... here's how to create a boot-able Mac High Sierra USB drive, on the Mac side of things:https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372, or you could, if you had a DVD of Snow Leopard, start up from that and do a clean install over top of High Sierra.... I don't know if you have a DVD of Snow Leopard or not... and a working DVD drive . but if you did, you'd restart, holding down the "C" key on the keyboard....the tray would come out, and you'd put the Snow Leopard dvd in the tray label side up and then close the drawer, then immediately hold down the "Option" key or keep holding down the "C" key.....and hopefully it would start up into Snow Leopard......
just a guess though
john b
Mac Pro 2006 through 2012 do not have Recovery in their ROM.
If your drive lacks a recovery partition, you have no way to get to recovery.
have you run full updated High Sierra 10.13.6 at some point?
Thank you Grant.
Yes -- I ran 10.13.6 for multiple years.
I am considering reversing the process that I did when I installed the SSD a couple of years ago. Converting one of the spinning HDs to the primary drive. Then using CCC to move the OS to the SSD. Maybe that will create the recovery partition?
Other suggestions appreciated.
Thanks.
Hi John B ---
I have a boot-able Mac High Sierra USB drive -- but running into the same issues with the keyboard not being recognized -- the Mac Pro just ignores all keyboard input on start-up and goes directly to the start screen. I have not tried booting into diagnostics.
I have a Snow Leopard boot disk, but not an install disk. Doubt that is of much help. I will canvas my friends to see if anyone has an install disk. The Superdrive works fine.
I replaced the pram battery a couple of years ago -- worth a shot.
Thanks!
If your internal SSD is seen by the system as a RAID, Installer considers it not bootable, and will not attempt to create the EFI partition on it.
If you can get CarbonCopyCloner to create the correct partitions and place MacOS there, and it works, that would be very interesting news to other users of similar SSD drives wanting to Boot MacOS from those devices.
I made a mistake in my previous post. I referred to the required partition as the EFI partition, when I meant to say the Recovery partition.
--------
In thinking more deeply about this whole issue, what you really need is ANY Recovery partition on ANY connected drive. There is no strong need to have it be on the Boot Drive.
That could also be
• the Recovery partition from a recent Time machine Backup drive, -OR-
• the Recovery partition on a recent bootable USB-stick Installer drive -OR-
• the Recovery partition on a MacOS bootable backup external drive.
Grant -- that is exactly what I am hoping. I ran diskutil list last evening and noted that 3 of the 4 spinning hard drives in the Mac Pro have Recoverable partitions -- even though I had earlier erased them using Security Option 2.
I set up Time Machine on one of the drives. Will I be able to boot to that drive?
Thanks again.
Time machine backup drives after 10.7.3 are said to contain a Recovery partition. Being able to boot from that is very likely.
Over a decade ago, the Recovery tools you needed were on the Installer DVD. (The last of those had 10.6.someting.) We were fine with it being on a different drive than the daily Boot Drive.
For me -- the Recovery Partition on other connected drives did not provide help -- I did not know how to tell the Mac to look on another drive, and it did not do that check automatically.
What did the trick was creating a bootable disk on one of the other hard drives in the Mac Pro. Then cloning that drive to the SSD using Carbon Copy Cloner and created the missing Recovery Partition.
I hope this helps others who run into the same issue.
Thanks to all who weighed in with suggested fixes.
<< I did not know how to tell the Mac to look on another drive, and it did not do that check automatically. >>
The way you do the is to invoke the Startup Manager, also known as a Boot Picker.
Hold Option at startup, and your Mac will take several minutes and look at every possible place a Boot drive could be, and show an Icon for every potentially-bootable drive it finds.
for a keyboard to be seen for "snag keys" it must be plugged into a port DIRECTLY on the chassis, not an a display or any Hub.
wow -- I wish I had known that ....
mac high sierra will not start into recovery mode
