How to remove Recovery HD partition from Lion?

You can remove it in disk utility or boot camp

The Lion Recovery HD is takes up ~650mb of space. Unless you really need that space, you might want to forget spending the time looking for a way to delete that partition. I think you can delete it using Terminal commands. But first, try going into Terminal and do a diskutil list to see its size.

Here's mine:

/dev/disk0

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *320.1 GB disk0

1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1

2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD SL 60.3 GB disk0s2

3: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD Lion 258.8 GB disk0s3

4: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s4

The key point here is that you are mistaken about the Recovery Partition's size. It is not approximately 5 Gigs in size.

If 650 MB is that critical for the amount of space on your drive, you have way mnore serious problems because you are far to short of free space to safely running Lion.

Allan

The easiest way to remove the recovery partition is to make a clone of the contents of your primary partition (in this case, the partition that houses Lion) on another drive, wipe your current drive, and then restore the clone back to your primary drive.

I'm sure there are other 3rd party parition managers that can also excise the recovery partition, but you may have to move the contents of your primary parition to fill that slot, and that can take an extremely long time.

As always, have a backup.

Adding to what cksum mentions, cloning back will not affect the operation of the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, and that's a good thing. 🙂

Rudolfensis wrote:

Wouldn't it be smart for Apple to use files in it — because aren't they some core system files? Perhaps if they were made read-only... maybe files that aren't to be changed, ever... even with updates... would be more space efficient..

No, it wouldn't be smart at all.

As you've already been told once, if you have such a space crunch that 650 mb is a problem, you have far worse issues on your machine.

The easiest way to remove it is to use Disk Utility.

1) Make the Recovery visible in Disk Utility by using a program like Secrets: http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/27025/secrets or MacPilot: http://www.koingosw.com/products/macpilot.php (15 day free trial).

2) Highlite the Recovery partition and Control click it and select Mount the partition.

3) With the Recovery partition highlited, erase the partition, you'll get an error message, ignore it.

4) Now highlite the top identity of the hard drive and select the partition tab.

5) Highlite the Recovery partition and press the minus sign.

6) Click and hold on the bottom edge of the partition above and drag it to the bottom, if it doesn't go there automatically, the press apply.

Good luck.

Helped me because I went from Lion back to SnowLeo via TM and still had the Recovery HD on my drive.

Glad it helped, It's alot easier than cloning your hard drive, repartitioning, and cloning it back, as was previously suggested.

You have major problems and obviously don't know and have wrong ideas about how a OS works. If 650MB become GOLD for you and looking for "nonsense" ways to recover that small space for storing some files on it because you're running short on HD space, you've got big problems, pardner! .., lol, lol, lol,.., The only way to solve that would be to go out and buy yourself a new machine with plenty disk space. Make sure getting some books too, so that the next time you know how an OS system works and how much extra space the system needs in order to run properly OR your question makes no sense at all in the first place.