Recovery Disk Does not Appear

I need to repair the main volume on my hard drive, but the repair button is disabled for the Main volume in Disk Utility. So, I followed the instructions at:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4848 to create a Recovery Disk on an external USB hard drive. Everything seemed to go well, but when I press the option key with restart to select my recovery disk for startup it does not appear (only my Main volume is visible). I'm not sure what is going wrong.

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Mavericks (10.9.1)

Posted on Feb 6, 2014 12:59 PM

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1 reply

Feb 6, 2014 1:04 PM in response to t6p

Try this instead:


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 arrow button below the icon.


If this fails, then you either do not have a Recovery HD installed or it is corrupted. If that be the case, then you need to repartition your drive then reinstall OS X:


Install Mavericks, Lion/Mountain Lion Using Internet Recovery


Be sure you backup your files to an external drive or second internal drive because the following procedure will remove everything from the hard drive.


Boot to the Internet Recovery HD:


Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND-OPTION- R keys until a globe appears on the screen. Wait patiently - 15-20 minutes - until the Recovery main menu appears.


Partition and Format the hard drive:


1. Select Disk Utility from the main menu and click on the Continue button.


2. After DU loads select your main hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.


3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID then click on the OK button. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed. Quit DU and return to the main menu.


Reinstall Lion/Mountain Lion. Mavericks: Select Reinstall Lion/Mountain Lion, Mavericks and click on the Install button. Be sure to select the correct drive to use if you have more than one.


Note: You will need an active Internet connection. I suggest using Ethernet

if possible because it is three times faster than wireless.


This will install the original version of OS X that was pre-installed on the computer when it was new.

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Recovery Disk Does not Appear

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