Recreate Recovery Partition

Todd@Oz wrote:

The recovered contents didn't include creating a new Recovery Partition.

Wow, that's seriously messed up crap there.

I don't use TimeMachine, but I didn't know it doesn't also copy the Recovery HD partition.

Ok, I'll tell you what you have to do. Disconnect TimeMachine.

1: Get a blank powered external drive equal to or slightly larger than your boot drive.

2: Get a 1GB USB Thumb drive

3: Use Disk Utility to Erase with Security Option Zero the external drive, it's going ot take awhile, maps off any bad sectors.

4: Format the USB under Partition: options GUID and format OS X Extended -J

4.5 Download Carbon Copy Cloner and clone your OS X partition to the external drive, the default setting is fine and it's going to take awhile.

5: Copy this software to the USB

https://support.apple.com/kb/dl1433

6: Go find a "friend" with a Lion Box that will let you run Admin, transfer the software and install it

7: Run the software and target the USB, it will copy his Recovery HD to the USB

8: Go back to your machine, option key boot off the clone and check it out, neat, good.

9 Erase with Zero the entire internal drive drive from the clone, wait till done

10 reboot off the USB holding the option key and boot off it, install the Lion Recovery onto the drive.

11. option key boot off the clone and reverse clone onto the OS X partition.

now your all set.

Reducing bad sectors effect on hard drives

https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks/macbook_pro?view=documents

I'm not positive, but I believe that just re-installing Lion onto your current Lion HD will automatically re-create the Recovery partition there without erasing any of your stuff.

If you have an older Mac and had downloaded Lion from the App Store, you should be able to download and install another copy of Lion from there. If your Mac came with Lion, you should be able to re-install Lion either via Internet Recovery, or by booting from your Time Machine disk ( a new feature) - press Command-R while booting in either case.

CCC Carbon Copy Cloner has a utility called "Disk Center" that is included with CCC that will create a Recovery Partition for you. I understand that CCC is not free, but it does have a free 30 day trial.

The "Disk Center" in CCC Carbon Copy Cloner is not obvious or easy to find, unless you know where to look for it (in the Window menu pulldown)... it's easy to miss. Once you find it in the CCC menu system, it is a quick (<5min) turnkey way to create a Recovery HD Partition on any disk, internal or external.

I thought I should share this, since I burned several hours of pain-staking research and experimentation in search of how to create/re-create a "Recovery HD" Partition for my MacBook Retina Mavericks laptop. My journey was varietal, including:

1. Successfully using a manual set of instructions with Terminal to execute a multi-step approach that worked ( http://www.macworld.com/article/2056561/how-to-make-a-bootable-mavericks-install -drive.html )
2. As well as a utility from musings.slivertooth.us that worked for me as advertised. Only problem is that while I appreciate and respect the great utility that guy created, my risk-averse nature prevents me from using a non-commercial utility to muck with the low-level details of my boot drive. Great job, but I prefer CCC since it's backed by a commercial SW company. Here's his great uility, as referenced in Apple discussion threads like this one: ( http://musings.silvertooth.us/2012/03/restoring-a-lost-recovery-partition-in-lio n/ )
3. Therefore, I was relieved to discover that CCC has a utility specifically designed to do this for me.

FYI: How did I find myself in this position? I lost my Recovery HD partition because I used Super Duper to Clone my HD/SSD, and subsequently restored my MacBook at one point. Super Duper has worked awesomely well for me for several years. It clones HDs/SSDs without a glitch, and makes them bootable automatically. The only gap or lack of function I have discovered is that "Super Duper" does not Clone the "Recovery HD" Partition. CCC Carbon Copy Cloner does. So, while I like Super Duper, I'm switching to CCC Carbon Copy Cloner for my backups from now on.

Disclaimer: I don't work for CCC. I'm just an I/T Professional that needed to figure out how to create/re-create a Recovery HD Partition...

Reinstall the OS. A new Recovery partition will be created.

Bill, why are you digging up topics that are more than a year old?

I burned several hours figuring out the easiest and safest way to create/re-create a "Recovery HD" Partition on my MacBook, because I lost it using Super Duper. I never before had a reason to use CCC over Super Duper. I develop software for a living and build prototypes for clients, consulting on the road, so I need to clone my MacBook regularly and have a rock-solid recovery plan as a 'road warrior'.

Therefore, when I surprisingly discovered, the other day, that I no longer had a Recovery HD partition and had to re-create one, it sent me on a research initiative that ate up more than half a day that I didn't have to waste.

So, to answer your question. I thought I should share my experience in the hopes that it would save others the time that I had lost. Therefore, I searched for topics on this forum related to "Creating a Recovery HD Partition" and posted my experience in the hopes it would help others.

I simply wanted to "Pay it forward".

because I lost it using Super Duper

That's not possible. The recovery partition will always remain on the physical source drive when you use SuperDuper!. You just don't get one cloned to the target drive. Though there's even a way to do it with SD!.

The simplest way is to install OS X on the target drive. A recovery partition will be created on every physical drive you install OS X to, so you will end up with one there, and of course the one already on your main drive.

If you really want to do things the long way around with SuperDuper!, since you already have it, do this:

1) Use Disk Utility to create small partition at the end of the target drive you want a recovery partition on.

2) With Disk Utility closed, open Terminal and enter this text (copy/paste the next line).

defaults write com.apple.DiskUtility DUDebugMenuEnabled 1

3) Launch Disk Utility. There will now be a menu heading for Debug. Click on that and select Show every partition to enable it. All hidden partitions will now be shown.

4) Highlight the recovery partition and click the Mount button.

5) Now that it's visible, use SuperDuper! to clone the recovery partition to the small partition you created on the target drive.

6) Go back to Disk Utility and unmount the recovery partition.

It doesn't matter that the cloned recovery partition on the target drive is always visible. It's still bootable and will work the same way.

But yes, it's nice to share discoveries.

I am one of the minority of Retina MacBook Pro owners (mid-2012 rMBP) who actually had an SSD failure. My 768GB SSD on my rMBP failed. I verified this at the Genius bar using the "SMART Utility", which is a faster way to check an SSD than Drive Genius. SMART Utility runs it's SSD failure check in about 5 seconds. So, Apple replaced my 768GB SSD. And, when they did this I specifically asked them to just give me the MacBook WITHOUT installing MAC OS X on it, knowing that

(1) It would save me some valuable 'wait time' since I would not have to wait for them to install MAC OS X and run their SW install checks and

(2) I had a Super Duper Clone at home that I had made a couple days prior.

So, I got my rMBP with a fresh un-initialized virgin 768GB SSD in it. Took it home. Booted from my external Super Duper Clone. I had to use Disk Utility to 'initialize' my new rMBP native 768GB SSD. Then I used Super Duper to Clone my external clone back onto my native rMBP SSD.

The end result was a MacBook without a Recovery HD. I hope that helps explain how it happened.

If I had used CCC, my impression is that it would have been just as turnkey (Replace Drive, boot externally, Clone back onto MacBook, totally one-click easy) but I would have also ended up with a functioning MacBook WITH a Recovery HD Partition after all that.

Ah! Yes, that's what would happen cloning back to a bare drive.

Still don't think I'd go through all of the steps using the script installer in your second link. Just reinstalling the OS over itself will accomplish the same end result.

Agreed, or just using CCC.

Thank you very much for the discussion and for sharing your insights and advice/experience.

Thanks to the details you shared, I can see how I could do this without CCC, etc. Very helpful indeed.

Take care. :-)

You're welcome, Bill. Thanks for joining in here. 🙂