How do I partition a new HD to include Recovery?

Doing "diskutil list" only showed 3 lines, containing 2 partitions. The first line was the overall drive, the second line was the reserved EFI partition, then the third line was my Mavericks installation. There wasn't a recovery partition: from what I've seen online, it's supposed to have another line containing that, but it wasn't there, in my case.

I'm reinstalling now, trying to add it manually.

Rats. Unfortunately, even after creating a 1 GB partition, the Mavericks installer still didn't see it. It only let me click on the drive for the main install. After it finished, I have a useless small partition, that it's trying to mount under /Volumes as if it was another drive. Obviously, I haven't found a way to "bless" that partition and turn it into an official Recovery partition. Why didn't the Mavericks installer do this automatically during the installation process? Other than that, it seemed to work perfectly.

How do you get it to correctly partition a blank drive automatically, so that it will create the Recovery partition like it's supposed to? I don't understand why it worked for others automatically but not for me.

Josh

Wow, so it's a feature that Apple quietly removed? 10.7 and 10.8 could create a full recovery partition from scratch, on a blank HD, but 10.9 can only update what already exists, and not create new?

Makes sense, in a way, because Apple is trying to migrate people over to using "Internet Recovery" instead of including a real recovery partition on their HD. So, why would Apple continue to make "Find My Mac" dependent on the existence of a full recovery partition, though?

I also found that webpage. I'm glad that tool exists. I will try that next. Wow, since that tool seems to be the only way in the world of creating a recovery partition on a new hard drive, that webpage, and the linked files on Dropbox, now becomes of critical importance! It's a shame that Apple wouldn't just do this automatically when installing Mavericks.

http://musings.silvertooth.us/2013/10/recovery-partition-creator-3-7-updated-for -mavericks/

Josh

That's the next thing I'm trying now. I have downloaded a fresh copy of the Installer app from the App Store, and will copy that to a USB stick just so I don't have to download it again. On another USB stick, I'll try converting it to a real bootable image. Good news, the same webpage also offers such a tool to do this.

http://musings.silvertooth.us/2013/10/mavericks-bootable-disk-creation-tool/

Apple should really hire this guy and use him to improve the installation experience in Mavericks 🙂

Thanks!

I followed the instructions from that page, downloaded the program, pointed it at my 8GB USB key, and it worked. It was a little flaky, popping up some strange dialog boxes (such as a box that was empty except for the number "1" and OK/Cancel buttons at bottom, I guessed and hit OK).

The USB key became bootable. I booted into it OK. I wanted to erase the entire hard drive completely empty, but the best that Disk Utility allows is to go back to a single partition, so I did that, as you said. GPT type, of course.

The install went normally, taking 25 minutes or so, then it rebooted, but the USB key still was the bootable device! It immediately started over, doing *another* 25 minutes on the progress bar. I had to go to a meeting so just left the computer unattended for an hour or so. When I came back, it seems to have settled down, because it was now at the Mavericks welcome screen! That's good news. I gave it the test, by removing the USB key then rebooting, and it passed.

I did "diskutil list" and was happy to see the recovery partition had been successfully created! Now I can enable "Find My Mac" without errors.

Rough experience, overall, not very Mac-like. I wish Apple would make it easier to do this: they should have had "Create DVD" and "Create USB" buttons right on their installer program, so people could make installation media for doing fresh installs.