Removal of Lion Recovery partition for SL installation

If you erase the hard drive you erase everything.

Hey Sig,

I have an issue where I want to erase the lion recovery disk and recoup that space for my roll-back to SL but I dont see any way to do that on my MBA. Any clue?

You can't and shouldn't do that. That's why you don't see any way to do that.

bendotson wrote:

Hey Sig,

I have an issue where I want to erase the lion recovery disk and recoup that space for my roll-back to SL but I dont see any way to do that on my MBA. Any clue?

Not sure if this will work, but try: Boot from your SL Install, Select Utility->Disk Utility, select your Macintosh HD, then select Partition->One Partition.

Resetting the partition to 1 will remove the Recovery partition.

Lanny wrote:

Resetting the partition to 1 will remove the Recovery partition.

Been there, done that. I assure you, while it would be simple enough, the SSD won't let it happen.

It's almost as if Disk Utility treats the partition not as a logical drive, but a physical one, once Lion creates it.

Disk Utility reads the Recovery Partition as your only startup partition, even though you booted using a Snow Leopard USB flash drive. It refuses to erase, or be included when you partition the entire drive as a single partition. I even took it to a Genius Bar, and it stumped everyone that the RC could not be touched with DU.

Erasing a partition is not a process for removing a partition.

I'm don't have any SSDs, so I can't comment on your assertion that it must always have a bootable partition even if you're not actually booting from it. But, if that is true, you still should be able to remove the Recovery partition after installing another bootable partition.

Lanny wrote:

Erasing a partition is not a process for removing a partition.

I was merely pointing out that neither can be done to the RP. I tried to resort to erasure as last ditch to regain the space, when repartitioning to a single partition failed all efforts.

Even after SL is installed, the RP is still untouchable on the SSD. I would have never thought it possible, had not several "Genius Bar" techs failed to also solve the problem. Maybe the "geniuses" were not so adept. If that is the case, I sure would like to see if a responder to this thread can solve it for the OP and myself.

Try this from the command line, then reopen Disk Utility.

Then select from the new Debug menu show all partitions.

defaults write com.apple.DiskUtility DUDebugMenuEnabled 1

Then what you could try is is select the Recover HD partition

and mount it. Then, see if you can reformat the entire drive

to one partition.

It could be that the Recovery HD volume does not get

recognized with a normal repartition because it is not a mounted

volume by default.

After you unhide the Recovery partition, you could also try mounting it, erasing it (you'll get an error message), afterwards, highlite the RP and then click on the "-" sign beneath the partitioning map.

@ SP Forsythe-

Thanks. You seem to have taken about as far as you could. That answers my question.

Have you tried starting the machine up in taget disk mode and try to erase the hard drive from another computer. I have heard this has worked in many cases.

Here's some info from Ars Technica:

The new partition is actually considered a different type:

Apple_Boot

diskutil

Apparently Apple has decided that the ability to boot a Mac into a known-good (software) state is well worth sacrificing a small amount of disk space. MacBook Air owners or other Mac users with diminutive solid-state disk drives may disagree, however. In that case, the disk space can be reclaimed by some judicious repartitioning with Disk Utility (or the

diskutil

Doing an erase and install back to Snow Leopard does not delete the Lion Recovery Partition, and it remains after the installation of SL. Here is how to get rid of it:

Deleting the Mac OS X 10.7 Lion “Recovery HD” Partition

Launch the Terminal and follow the directions in the above article, and it's gone. I successfully removed it by doing this.

jdeal63

jdeal63 wrote:

Doing an erase and install back to Snow Leopard does not delete the Lion Recovery Partition, and it remains after the installation of SL. Here is how to get rid of it:

Deleting the Mac OS X 10.7 Lion “Recovery HD” Partition

Launch the Terminal and follow the directions in the above article, and it's gone. I successfully removed it by doing this.

jdeal63

Was your successful venture on an SSD?

Using Terminal, and not the GUI interface of DU gets past the "you cannot erase a startup partition" error?