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Restoring Recovery HD to drive after backup

Hi,


I recently set up Full Disk Encryption on my MacBook Pro, and in the process of backing up and restoring the OS I wiped the Recovery HD. Here's what I did:


1) Cloned the system to a bootable USB drive using Carbon Copy Cloner


2) Booted to the Recovery HD on the MacBook Pro


3) Formatted the Boot partition as HFS Encrypted using Disk Utility


4) Mounted my MacBook Pro's drive on my Mac mini over FireWire using Target Disk Mode


5) Cloned the system back to the MacBook Pro using Carbon Copy Cloner


Just to clarify: this is an Apple-supported method for implementing Full Disk Encryption. On boot, you are asked for the password for the encrypted drive, and on correct entry you are presented with the Login Screen. This method is, for me, preferable to the method implemented through FileVault in the System Preferences because it doesn't require automatic login to a user account.


So, like I say in the subject, in the process of doing this I accidentally overwrote the Recovery HD. Now, I know it's possible to use the Recovery Disk Assistant to create a Recovery HD on an external drive, but given that this is a mobile device I'd rather it was on the boot drive itself.


Does anyone know how I can restore the Recovery HD without having to perform a clean install of the OS? The drive is an SSD, and I'd rather minimise the number of write operations necessary to solve this problem.


Thanks.

Mac mini (Mid 2011), OS X Mountain Lion, 8GB RAM, 500GB HDD

Posted on Jan 2, 2013 9:39 AM

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Posted on Jan 2, 2013 9:53 AM

Are you sure the Recovery HD is gone? I only ask as my understanding with FileVault 2 is that the Recovery HD can only be accessed via COMMAND+R at boot time. Also, I think the Recovery HD has to be present in order to use FileVault 2.

3 replies

Jan 2, 2013 10:25 AM in response to keg55

Aha! At the very end of your second article was the following gem:


When FileVault 2 is enabled, Recovery HD does not appear in the Startup Manager (which is accessed by holding Option during startup)

I have never accessed Recovery HD using any other method, but now that I try the Command-R way, I find that the recovery HD is there after all.


Thanks 🙂

Restoring Recovery HD to drive after backup

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