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Hello what could be the cause of a missing firmware partition when it comes to software update on my mac mid 2012
I was running macOs catalina on my mac and the os just stopped working and I had to start from Internet recovery but now I can't update the mac from mountain lion to other os tried some solutions online but didn't workout
MacBook Pro
By "firmware partition" are you referring to the recovery partition? If so, there could be a number of reasons why it got deleted. The key now, of course, is how to recreate it. The "simplest" way would be to fully erase your Mac's drive, and then, install a clean copy of macOS on it. However, it still may be possible to recreate it without having to go through those steps.
As such, see if any of the following articles can help. Note that each of these articles refer to a script utility, called: Recovery Partition Creator. The issue is that this utility may no longer be available since these articles were written. Just providing them to you as an option.
By "firmware partition" are you referring to the recovery partition? If so, there could be a number of reasons why it got deleted. The key now, of course, is how to recreate it. The "simplest" way would be to fully erase your Mac's drive, and then, install a clean copy of macOS on it. However, it still may be possible to recreate it without having to go through those steps.
As such, see if any of the following articles can help. Note that each of these articles refer to a script utility, called: Recovery Partition Creator. The issue is that this utility may no longer be available since these articles were written. Just providing them to you as an option.
I have seen the error message regarding a "missing firmware partition" while installing macOS 10.13+ whenever the internal drive is missing or improperly formatted. I have never seen this error when installing any older versions of macOS since only macOS 10.13+ includes a system firmware updater within the macOS installers.
Have you tried running the Apple Diagnostics to see if any hardware issues are detected? Unfortunately the diagnostics don't detect all types of drive failures. I can provide instructions for creating and using a bootable Linux USB stick to check the health of the internal drive if you are interested. There is also a possibility that the hard drive SATA Cable is bad which is very common with the 13" non-Retina model.
If you are trying to install an older version of macOS 10.7 to 10.12, then you will need to properly erase or partition & format the whole physical drive (depends on which OS you are installing). If installing macOS 10.11 or 10.12, then select the physical drive and erase the physical drive as GUID partition and MacOS Extended (Journaled). If you are installing macOS 10.7 to 10.10, then partition & format the physical drive using the instructions in this article:
https://www.owcdigital.com/assets/support/support-formatting-and-migration/Mac_Formatting_6-10.pdf
Missing firmware partition
