Removal of Lion Recovery partition for SL installation

Regular HD. Never tried this on SSD since I don't have one.

Somehow this discussion has started to focus on SSDs even though the Original Poster has never posted back and appears to have a 80 Gig hard drive, as MacBook Airs did not ship with 80 Gig SSDs.

I hope the OP is sucessful with the good information already posted in this thread, and the diversion did not take away from anything.

Hi Guys,

This is my first post. So if I leave out any pertinent information let me know and I will try to correct. I have a 2010 MBA (SSD) that was upgraded to Lion. I'm now planning to sell the MBA. What I understand from reading Apple's policy on reselling your MAC is that you are supposed to return it to it's orginal state. For me, that means reinstalling SL. But, if I've upgraded to Lion, does that mean 1) can not remove the Recovery Disc parition that was created by Lion? Which leads to 2) I CAN NOT reclaim that 8gb set asside for the Lion RD? So then, what happens when the new owner discovers it and decides to recover using that parition instead of the SL key fob?

So what do you suggest?

Leave Lion or

Reinstall SL and lose the 8GB or

Is there a way to reclaim the RD partition....

SP Forsythe wrote:

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.

Try Firewire Target Disk Mode?

Try Lion clone option booted from a external drive?

Try a PartedMagic cd or boot USB?

The Lion Recovery Partition likely has a boot flag on it, turn it off and it will light up like a dried out christmas tree.

Which gives me ideas, time to poke around in Lion Recovery parttion. 👿

Boot with your SL install disk

Select Language, then

From the Menu Bar, select Utility->Terminal

Enter:

defaults write com.apple.DiskUtility DUDebugMenuEnabled 1

Quit Terminal

From the Menu Bar, select Utility->Disk Utility

Select Debug->Show every partition (you will see the Recovery HD)

Click the Partiton Tab, partiton as 1 partition (the Receovery HD should now be gone)

exit Disk Utility

Install Snow Leopard.

Tony, Thanks for the suggestion. I tried it, but I get an error in Terminal...

"could not write domain com.apple.DiskUtility: exiting..."

Any Suggestions?

Blake

ok, when I did it I was using a USB. If you're using a DVD, it looks like it can't write to it.

Nope, I was using the SL recovery USB when I tried it also. Let me ask you, when I look at the partitioned drive, it's called disk2 could that be part of the problem?

Try booting from another disk (not an install disk) and see if that works

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20083166-263/managing-the-os-x-10.7-lion-re store-drive/

http://osxdaily.com/2011/06/30/deleting-the-mac-os-x-10-7-lion-recovery-hd-parti tion/