What is Apple using to hide Lion Recovery, how can I duplicate it?

Question

What is Apple using to hide Lion Recovery, how can I duplicate it?

After installing Lion, it includes a recovery partition (Recovery HD). This partition is visible in the startup disk screen in the EFI (booting using option), however, it doesn't show up in finder, nor does it show up in Disk Utility (unless you have the debug menu, and enable show all partitions). Obviously it doesn't automount, that's one thing, but Apple is doing something to keep it from even showing up in disk utility.

Recently I upgraded my HDD in my Macbook Pro, I cloned it and so I lost the Lion Recovery utility. I've since added it back manually, and I'd like to place it in the same condition as it is when installed along side Lion (without having to go through migration on a fresh install, etc).

Does anyone know how to duplicate this state that the Lion Recovery HD is in?

I'm not really looking for alternatives - like reinstalling, etc, etc.. I'm also interested in the mechanism being used here.

Can anyone shed light?

Thanks!

2.66Ghz Unibody MBP, 4Gb Ram, Awful Glossy

Posted on Sep 10, 2011 12:30 PM

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Answer 1

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jsd2

Level 5

6,245 points

Sep 10, 2011 2:22 PM in response to [Shadowbottle]

Just a guess, but if you run diskutil list from Terminal, the Recovery HD partition is reported as type "Apple_Boot", whereas the visible partitions are reported as type "Apple_HFS". Perhaps that is the reason the Recovery HD partition doesn't normally show up in Disk Utility. The small partition of type "EFI" normally doesn't show up either:

I've since added it back manually,

How did you do this? Does it boot and function normally?

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Answer 2

Sep 11, 2011 8:36 AM in response to jsd2

Yeah I was just reading about the Apple_Boot type, still haven't found a way to do this to any of my own partitions, unfortunately.

Manually, I just created the smallest partition I could and then used Disk Utility Debug to "Show All Partitions" - on my original Lion installed HDD, then I just restored "Recovery HD" to the new small partition on the new drive, and changed fstab to not automount it.

Now the annoying bit is that it shows up in Disk Utility (which isn't so bad) and I haven't looked up how to keep it from mounting in Windows, but other than that it works fine. I'd just really like to put it in the same hidden condition as it was when I originally installed Lion.

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Answer 3

jsd2

Level 5

6,245 points

Sep 11, 2011 10:12 AM in response to [Shadowbottle]

I just found this outside thread:

Missing Recovery Partition After Cloning hard drive

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1153706

From post #7 there:

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You can set it to Apple_Boot using gpt and this is indeed what hides it from GUI apps like disk utility. Apple_Boot is just a hidden version of Apple_HFS; the recovery partition is just an ordinary journaled HFS+ volume that can be manually mounted with diskutil mount disk0s3 (or whatever slice the recovery partition happens to be).

To change a GUID partition type to Apple_Boot one needs to know the UUID -- which for reference is 426F6F74-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC -- and remove the partition using gpt then re-add it with the desired type. This won't destroy the data of course, but one needs to make a note of the start and size values of the partition (as shown by gpt show) before the remove and then use them when re-adding. See the manual page for gpt.

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From post #12 there:

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Through some accidental research (don't ask…), I found that Lion's version of Disk Utility will also restore the Recovery HD partition when using DU's Restore to image a Lion Partition. I verified this several times. If there is no Recovery HD, it will recreate an existing one from the source HD to the destination, and will be positioned immediately following the Lion partition.

If no Recovery HD exists in the source, but does in the destination, it will leave the destination alone. For instance, if you have an image of a Lion partition, but for some reason, no Recovery partition, you can do a clean install of Lion on the destination - creating a Recovery partition - then restore your Lion image to the destination (replacing the clean install). It will leave the recovery partition alone at the destination.

If no Recovery HD exists in either source or destination, I don't believe DU will create one - this is one scenario I didn't test.

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