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

Yes, it has to be mounted first.

I think you are meant to tick "show every partition" in Disk Utility (in the Debug menu)

or run a Terminal command:

diskutil mount disk0s3

if it's your third slice.

Edit: then do the same with the other one (on the external drive or what have you with the clone and the outdated Recovery HD on it) and smart update it.

Yes, it has to be mounted first.

Okay, that's what I figured you were doing, but I wanted to be sure. Unfortunately, DU will no longer show the recovery partitions, even with that option on.

Unfortunately, DU will no longer show the recovery partitions, even with that option on

Hmmm, I can still see them.

That's weird. I wonder why it isn't showing on my end? I know the recovery partition exists since it shows up as a choice with an Option key restart. But this is all I get in DU. It shows the EFI stub partitions, but not the recovery.

D'oh! It isn't there because (drum roll), I deleted it a few weeks ago (sheepish grin).

I'm more suprised that when I installed 10.9.2 from a full installer that it didn't put a new recovery partition on the drive. Not that I wouldn't have removed it again anyway.

If it really was the full installer 1.3.40 (5.33 GB) and you don't have corestorage, then it definitely is very surprising.

But there is always the install.log to look and see what happened.

If it really was the full installer 1.3.40 (5.33 GB) and you don't have corestorage, then it definitely is very surprising.

Nope no corestorage. Installer was directly from Apple via the App Store. I did make a bootable 10.9.2 installer flash drive from it, but did the actual update from the downloaded installer.

But there is always the install.log to look and see what happened.

Nah, not important to know why. I would have removed it anyway. I have the bootable flash installer drive. I also have two Mavericks partitions, one each on two different physical drives. I can use either as a way to restore my cloned drive back to the main drive. I also have DiskWarrior, TechTool Pro, Drive Genius, Data Rescue III and FileSalvage on both of those drives to do any maintenance, recovery or repair on the main drive with.

So while the recovery partition only takes up about 650 MB of space, that's space I could use for something else since I would truly never use the recovery partition to attempt a repair on any other drive, or reinstall the OS from. So I can it.

Edit: Oh! I know why it didn't recreate the recovery drive. Windows 7 is the bottom partition (see screen shot above). The installer always wants to put the recovery partition at the end of the drive, of the same drive you are installing OS X to. Since OS X cannot natively modify an NTFS partition, it fails at the attempt to add the partition.

Carbon Copy Cloner will clone the Recovery partition (if that's what you want) when you are cloning the main partition, SuperDuper will not. So far that is what has already been stated by other posters. I have found slightly annoyingly that CCC when it clones the Recovery partition does so to a new one of 1GB in size whereas the original Apple one is only 650MB in size.

I was not aware Disk Utility copied the recovery partition but I knew it was possible to put multiple 'partitions' in to a disk image file.

However getting more on topic which is upgrading recovery partitions and/or installing one if it is missing. The solution I use for this is Create Recovery Partition Installer.

See https://github.com/MagerValp/Create-Recovery-Partition-Installer

This takes the Lion, Mountain Lion or Mavericks installers that you downloaded from the App Store and uses it to build an Apple installer package. This package when run by Apple's Installer program will then let you install the version of Recovery partition that matches the version of OS X you built the package from. I have therefore used this tool to make installer packages for Recovery partitions matching 10.7.5, 10.8.5, 10.9.1 and 10.9.2.

I can easily install any of these versions and even should I wish downgrade the installed version as well as upgrading the installed version.

You can obviously have a Recovery partition of say 10.7.5 and a boot partition which is 10.8.5 but the reverse is also true. I say obviously because the whole issue has been how do you upgrade the Recovery partition presumably to match the version of your presumably up-to-date boot partition.

As a reminder, yes you can have a recovery partition on a drive being used for Boot Camp i.e. Windows, no you cannot have a recovery partition on a drive that is configured as part of a software RAID set, yes you absolutely must have a recovery partition if you want to use FileVault2. You can have a recovery partition on a drive which has no OS X partition on it. The drive must be partitioned using the GUID scheme.

To completely cover the topic of Recovery partitions, DeployStudio now uses the Recover partition to build the NetBoot disk image you use with DeployStudio. If you are running DeployStudio on a server which is using software RAID then this does create a very annoying problem. You either have to not use software RAID on your server, or create the NetBoot set using DeployStudio Assistant on a second (non RAIDed) Mac, or when I last hit this I did find accidently that having another external drive plugged in which had a Recovery partition on it got round the problem.

Note: DeployStudio will restore Recovery partitions along with the boot partition for you to the Macs you are imaging.

If rather than using a 'monolithic' disk image with DeployStudio you use a 'thin' one created using InstaDMG or AutoDMG then there is no Recovery partition for DeployStudio to restore, fortunately these thin images are built in a way that automatically installs one for you.

AutoDMG is another tool by the author of Create Recovery Partition Installer.