Delete Macintosh HD but keep Recovery HD

If you decide to redo a Recovery HD, you could set the partition large enough to hold the entire installESD.dmg, avoiding any download requirement later. I wouldn't personally do that because I wouldn't want to see the Recovery HD unless I needed it.

On my one machine, a Mid-2011 MacBook Air 128GB, I reformatted and no longer have a Recovery HD at all. I went this route because I had "Burned" the installESD.dmg to a thumbdrive that has the complete install image. I find the download of Lion excruciatingly slow even over my brisk connection. Also, with only 128GB SSD, I am reserving every bit of it I can.

In your post you say:

If I enable DIsk Utility to show hidden partitions, that drive looks like this:

I have searched Disk Utility prefs and help (Lion 7.1) but could not find how to do that. How can it be done please?

There are a few ways to do this, but probably the most versatile is to first enable Disk Utility's "secret" Debug menu. Once this is done, you can then check the "Show every partition" option in that Debug menu:

You can enable/disable Disk Utility's Debug menu using these Terminal commands:

defaults write com.apple.DiskUtility DUDebugMenuEnabled -bool true

defaults write com.apple.DiskUtility DUDebugMenuEnabled -bool false

then relaunch Disk Utility

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or you can use Onyx to do this:

Hi jsd2,

Sorry, I'm a little off topic here:

I keep accumulating fully written out commands for OS X, like those above to enable the DU debug menu, piecemeal. Do you know of some resource, such as a book, or one place on the Internet, that lists many of them, or at least those that are most useful?

The only site that I know of is Secrets, which is of some value but is very incomplete.

As it happens, Secrets contains a Terminal command for directly enabling Disk Utility's ability to show hidden partitions (here), but I couldn't find the Terminal command to enable the Debug menu. I think using the Debug menu is handier, because you can then toggle the hidden partitions option on and off with just a click, rather than re-entering a Terminal command each time.

I keep a "System Hints" folder full of collected "pearl" weblocs, which I then search with Finder/Spotlight when I want to retrieve something that I vaguely remember having read.

Thanks. Secrets is OK, but not very complete. Some of them are in UI form in TinkerTool or Deeper. Any chance you might be interested in posting the contents of your System Hints folder? I'll bet it's full of some really useful gems. In my case, I've bookmarked literally thousands of things in Firefox -- not just commands, but everything under the sun. But since I don't have them cataloged in any very accessible way, and since I don't remember bookmarking most of them, I'm often back to square one searching. I've also got a large folder that includes some commands. I keep promising I'll get it organized one day.

(I've also probably bought everything I need for the rest of my life; I just can't remember where I put it all 😊)

I keep promising I'll get it organized one day.

Is your disability keeping you from completing that task? 😝

Sorry, simply could not resist....... 😁

Best answered by this great Roz Chast cartoon.

I see - and here I thought it was merely sloth.....😀

Any chance you might be interested in posting the contents of your System Hints folder? I'll bet it's full of some really useful gems. In my case, I've bookmarked literally thousands of things in Firefox -- not just commands, but everything under the sun.

Heh - my System Hints folder is basically also a large random collection of assorted bookmarks - it includes .webloc links to published articles, Terminal commands, support documents, and discussion threads, all jumbled together. It is useful to me only because it is searchable.

There seem to be some well-organized people on these boards, but I'm certainly not one of them! 😉

I thought that was the pot of gold. Ah well....😟 Mine is kind of searchable, when I can remember the right keywords. Maybe there's some book.

I used level4 to organise all my clippings etc. but I'm not sure if it's being updated anymore.

Regards,

Colin R.

Thanks Colin. Is there anything anywhere on how to use it? Does it work in SL?

The author is a level 6 in here but hasn't posted recently.

There's a link to the dmg here in this old thread:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2671512?start=0&tstart=0

Regards,

Colin R.

I know it's off topic, But since you are already off topic, you really should use the insert link, or so I've been told.

Colin Robinson wrote:

The author is a level 6 in here but hasn't posted recently.

There's a link to the dmg here in this old thread:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2671512?start=0&tstart=0

Regards,

Colin R.