how do I create a recovery partition?

Question

Level 1

8 points

how do I create a recovery partition?

I would like to utilize the "Find my Mac" option in iCloud but I must have a recovery partition in order to do so. My guess is I will have to make a backup to my Time Capsule, erase the drive and create a second partition for the recovery partition and then do a restore to the primary partition. I'm hoping there is a way to do this without having to go through the wait of a full system recovery. Last one due to hard drive failure took about 18 hours over the 10/100 connection with the time capsule. A Gigabit Time Capsule 😉 would be awesome.

Thanks to anyone who may have a alternate not so painful solution.

V22Tweek

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.2)

Posted on Oct 17, 2011 7:03 PM

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Answer 1

Kappy

Level 10

361,731 points

Oct 17, 2011 7:06 PM in response to v22tweek

A Recovery HD is configured automatically when installing Lion. Why do you think you don't have one? You can test to see by restarting the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and "R" keys until the Recovery HD's main menu appears.

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Answer 2

steve359

Level 6

17,169 points

Oct 17, 2011 7:31 PM in response to Kappy

Kappy ... not to be"out of line" posting in this discussion, but another poster fragmented a disk badly ("hdd partitions are messed up", under BootCamp) who needs some help cloning-back Lion partition. I tried to help, but I will not advise about Lion.

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Answer 3

Kappy

Level 10

361,731 points

Oct 17, 2011 7:32 PM in response to steve359

Can you provide the link to the topic, Steve?

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Answer 4

v22tweek Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 17, 2011 8:00 PM in response to v22tweek

My original OS was Snow Leapord, I upgraded to Lion via the App Store. I then replaced the hard drive with a SATA III Solid state drive (Man is it fast😍) When I did the restore I had to utilize my original Snow Leapord CD that came with the MAC to boot up and initiated a Full restore from my Time Capsule.

COMMAND R attempts to perform an internet recovery. If I hold the Option key to get a boot menu only my primary drive shows up, also in disk utility there was only one partition.

I did find out how to create the partion in Disk Utility I now have the primary partition (508 Gig) and a 3 Gig (I'm sure thats a bit much) partition for the recovery partition. Now I only need to figure out how to get the OS to recognize it as such.

Thanks for your help

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Answer 5

steve359

Level 6

17,169 points

Oct 17, 2011 8:02 PM in response to Kappy

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3400885?answerId=16424489022#16424489022

He just needs more help than I can give, ashamed as I am

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Answer 6

Kappy

Level 10

361,731 points

Oct 17, 2011 8:12 PM in response to v22tweek

Well, I'm not sure I'm quite clear. But the problem is that you restored Lion from your TM backup to a newly partitioned drive. So, there was no Recovery HD to restore. In order to have it done correctly you need to erase the startup drive, install Snow Leopard, then re-download and install Lion. This will provide the Lion system on the hard drive and also create the Recovery HD partition.

Now, you can create an emergency Recovery HD partition of your own using the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant 1.0. Now, the catch here is that this utility only installs the Recovery HD onto a USB drive and you must already have a Recovery HD partition on your startup drive. So you may be caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place; namely, you will need to do a Snow Leopard then Lion installation.

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Answer 7

Oct 17, 2011 8:23 PM in response to v22tweek

Mac OS X Disk Utility LIES to you. It claims it sees no recovery partition, when Third-party Utilities clearly show it is there.

Manually partitioning may not help. If you see Recovery HD when restarting with Option key, your recovery Partition is present and working.

On a new MacBook Pro:

Partition table took the first 40 blocks (same as Snow Leopard)

EFI System took the first about 209 MB (same as Snow Leopard)

Mac OS X HFS+ Volume took about 500 MB

Mac OS X Boot [Recovery HD] took the LAST about 650MB on the drive.

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Answer 8

Kappy

Level 10

361,731 points

Oct 17, 2011 8:22 PM in response to steve359

Steve,

I left him a post, but I don't know if it will truly solve his problem. He really needed to start over from the beginning from what I could tell.

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Answer 9

Kappy

Level 10

361,731 points

Oct 17, 2011 8:26 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

"Mac OS X Disk Utility LIES to you. It claims it sees no recovery partition, when Third-party Utilities clearly show it is there."

This is a little misleading. DU doesn't lie to you. The partition is hidden. It's quite simple to apply a change that makes DU show its Debug menu that lets you display even hidden partitons.

The OP said, "If I hold the Option key to get a boot menu only my primary drive shows up ... " It seems reasonable to assume the Recovery HD partition is no longer present or has been corrupted.

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Answer 10

v22tweek Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 17, 2011 8:57 PM in response to v22tweek

Sounds like that will be the solution then,

1. Perform TM backup

2. Wipe drive and install snow leapord

3. Redownload and install Lion

4. Perform restore from TM back-up (User files and applications only)

5. Reboot and enjoy

When I did the original restore I did a complete recovery from the TM backup without installing the OS first so it all makes sense as to what happened.

Thanks guys for the input.

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Answer 11

Oct 17, 2011 9:07 PM in response to Kappy

Thank you Kappy, for the tip about the Disk Utility's debug menu. I am much happier being able to see those Hidden partitions when I want to.

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