Booting To Recovery Goes To Internet Recovery

When you typed "diskutil list", did you see Recovery HD? If not, Recovery HD isn't in your Mac. The easiest solution is to reinstall OS X.

Another way to start from Recovery HD is to hold the Option (Alt) key while your Mac is starting, and select Recovery HD

Note that Recovery HD and Internet Recovery are the same, but Internet Recovery gets the Recovery volume from Apple

Are you saying you do not see the menu window on the screen with four options? What makes you think you have booted to the network recovery disk? Did it take 15 minutes or so for the globe to appear on the startup screen?

Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions - Lion/Mountain Lion

Boot to the Recovery HD:

Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.

Repair

When the recovery menu appears select Disk Utility. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported then click on the Repair Permissions button. When the process is completed, then quit DU and return to the main menu. Select Restart from the Apple menu.

When you see "Starting Internet Recovery", it's downloading Recovery HD from Apple. After being downloaded, you will get the same interface you would get if you have started from Recovery HD: a OS X Utilities window with options to restore a Time Machine backup, reinstall OS X, use Safari or Disk Utility. Internet Recovery is valid to repair your hard drive

You get the same options from the online internet recovery system as you do from the built in recovery HD partition.

I just want to use the Recovery HD to repair the disk ... I do not want to recover the whole drive from internet recovery or reinstall as new.

It's not giving you that choice, something went wrong with RecoveryHD (or it doesn't exist, like if you used Superduper to reverse clone with) so it's booting into Internet Recovery which is almost the same thing.

Both do the same thing, but IR installs the OS X verison that came with the machine 10.7 and up, and RecoveryHD installs the current upgraded OS X verison.

If you tried booting into RecoveryHD and it instead went to Internet Recovery and if diskutil list only shows a EFI partition, then something seriously BAD happened to your boot drive.

It should look almost like this, except last partition #3 will be labeled "OS X base system" or something like that.

(I'm running Snow Leopard which doesn't need RecoveryHD and I have another OS X boot partition, cloned for backup/restore)

I see that I have an EFI boot partition available.

You can't boot from that, it's a software based firmware that loads before any operating system does so it enables your at boot key commands and other things regardless of what operating system loads.

In fact if you reboot the machine holding Command V down, you can watch EFI load first.

How do I get it to boot into the local Recovery HD and NOT internet recovery?

Use the Internet Recovery to Reapir Disk on your entire disk0 also Repair Permissions (repeat 2x) and reboot, hopefully that will fix it or your doing the next step below.

So the problem is you likely need to grab files off the drive first, because your going to have to set it back up by reformatting it, or replace the drive if it's defective.

Create a data recovery/undelete external boot drive

Can you provide more detail what diskutil list actually shows?

Does Disk Utiltiy give any indication of the SMART status?

What were you doing that prompted this to occur? Any clues you can share?

You haven't got Recovery HD. In this case, and as you don't want to reinstall OS X, use Internet Recovery. When you want to reinstall Mountain Lion, download it from the App Store, but I insist that it's better to create Recovery HD

erugalatha wrote:

Here's what I have from diskutil list. I use SuperDuper to backup from disk1 to disk0. disk1 is my main system partition. I was expecting it to boot into the Recovery HD on disk1.

Well you don't have one anywhere.

It's because SuperDuper doesn't copy the RecoveryHD partition (however Carbon Copy Cloner does if you have one)

I assume you have a laptop and you replaced the Superdrive with a another drive, like a SSD correct?

That would explain why disk1 is your primary boot drive.

I was routinely running a Repair Permissions from disk util. Then I did a Verify disk from disk util and it said there were issues with the system drive and that I should boot into Recovery HD and do a repair.

Well a "live verification" by Disk Utility on the boot volume is a bit flaky.

Why don't you hold option/alt and boot to the disk0 and use that Disk Utility to Repair Disk on the other drive?

They are clones after all. 🙂

Apple doesn't expect people to use bootable clones, so the default is to tell you to use RecoveryHD which should be there if Superdupes did their job correctly, but they don't.

Most commonly used backup methods

To return your RecoveryHD partition, you will have to erase one of the drives via Internet Recovery and reinstall OS X version it gives you (upgrade OS X if need be), that will return the correct RecoveryHD and then you use Superdupes to clone just the MacintoshHD parittion from the other drive.

Once you have both up and running fine, then you use Carbon Copy Cloner instead as it will copy the RecoveryHD in the same process of cloning and give you the option to restore it to a new drive.

Like I said before, Internet Recovery restores the a new copy of OS X version that came with the machine or 10.7 minimal.

RecoveryHD restores the latest upgraded OS X verison, so it has to change when you upgrade OS X verisons.

Or what happens with no RecoveryHD partition is your installing a older OS X verison, and then having to upgrade to a later one with only Internet Recovery.

Also lets say you need to overwrite OS X with a fresh copy to fix issues, this leavs your programs and files alone so it's a needed feature.

See #8 here

..Step by Step to fix your Mac

With Superdupes your screwed because if your clone OS X is also corrupted you can't use RecoveryHD to get the latest OS X verison, you have to erase everything (all programs and files) and install the previous OS X verison, then upgrade again from AppStore.

Carbon Copy Cloner is the complete solution, not some half-implemented copycat.