Q: No recovery partition, how can I fix this?

Installed from an officially downloaded copy of Lion, Mountain Lion or Mavericks, a recovery partition will always be created. So what the seller likely did was clone a drive with Mavericks on it to the Mac you purchased. That will only clone the visible boot drive, not the hidden recovery partition.

Edit: If you restart and hold down Command+R, do you not get the recovery screen? Also, you can hold down the Option key immediately after restarting. If a recovery partition exists, it will appear as a choice.

Are you sure there is no recovery hard drive?  That is hidden from Disk Utility and will not show up.

Carbon Copy Cloner also clones the recovery hard drive unless the users tells it not to do so.  Not sure about the latest SuperDuper.

Boot Using OPTION key:

  1. Restart the computer.

  2. Immediately after the chime press and hold down the

      "OPTION" key.

  3. Release the key when the boot manager appears.

Do you see a disk called Recovery HD? If so, then you have one.

Good info to know about CCC. I know SuperDuper! doesn't. Not sure if there's an option to do that with SD. I've never looked.

Ralph,

CCC does not automatically clone a Recovery HD. It will ask whether you want to have one installed, but you must agree to do so.

On the other hand, Disk Utility clones both partitions automatically without any user interaction provided a Recovery HD exists.

SD does not and has no option to do so. The only decent tools for this are CCC and Disk Utility. The latter clones it automatically if it's present on the Source drive.

Ok, when I cloned my iMac internal to the external (more than a year ago) CCC didn't ask me if I wanted the recovery hard drive, in the list of options it was already checked.

That would not have been the latest version.  I like CCC because it does a good job of picking up everything on the hard drive.

But the simplest solution really is as you said, restart using the Option key and see if there is a recovery hard drive.

Or restart holding the Command and R keys and see if it boots

SD does not and has no option to do so.

And there's the answer on that!

I've never bothered with any recovery drive. All of our current Macs came with an OS on disk. As far as reinstalling Lion, Mountain Lion, or Mavericks, I have all three on bootable flash drives and use those for that purpose.

Though actually, I keep up to date clones using SuperDuper! for each Mac. If a drive goes south, you just replace it and clone the backup back. Way, WAY faster than reinstalling the OS and all of your third party apps, etc. from scratch. It's also far faster than reinstalling the OS with a Time Machine merge. (I don't use, and have never used TM, either).

Like you I have flash drive bootable installers. I also keep copies of the downloaded installer applications just in case. This makes reinstalling so much easier and faster.

I also keep copies of the downloaded installer applications just in case.

Yup, me too. I have all of the latest versions (Lion, ML, Mavericks) on an external drive.

Yes, just get the full installer from either your App Store's Purchases or "buy" it and run it.  That will create a Recovery HD and leave your files alone.

You are very welcome...you can see you raised some very interesting discussion :-)