Not sure if you've figured out the answer to your question. Its been more than a year 😀
It seems that you were looking to clone the Recovery partition into the image made. I have been successful in this when connecting a second Apple machine (in my case a mac mini) with a Thunderbolt cable and using it as an external hard drive. The advance steps worked with no issues.
I only came across issues when using the local machine with multiple partitions. Which seems to be your case. I've had issues with the first step, creating the image and just now resizing the volume. I feel your concerns.
One workaround would be to go ahead and continue the steps and skipping the resize and cloning of the recovery partition steps.
Once the image is ready, install it to the machine or hard drive. Doing this will leave the hard drive with no recovery partition. IMO unless your really need it, its fine to not have it. But if you want it, the following steps could be of use.
The following steps assumes you have 2 machines connected through either Thunderbolt or firewire OR you have the hard drive connected through a USB adapter (or something equivalent) to the machine with the source Recovery Partition.
After installing the image you will need to split the OS partition.
Either using Disk Utility or using terminal: diskutil splitPartition command. I have used the Disk Utility. In my case the application allows a partition to be a minimum of 1GB. Which is fine.
After splitting the OS partition now you want to clone the Recovery partition to the newly made partition. Use diskutil list to see in what /dev/*identifier* the appropriate partitions are in. You will need to unmount the target /dev/ if you get any errors.
asr restoreexact --source /dev/*Original Recovery* --target /dev/*New Partition* --erase
The above command should do the trick. You may need to use sudo in the beginning.
Once the cloning is finished, we want to change the partition type. From Apple_HFS to Apple_Boot
asr adjust -target /dev/*Newly clone Recovery* -settype Apple_Boot
That should be all to it. Hopefully this helps you out or someone else that may need a workaround.
Sources:
http://blog.magnusviri.com/apple-boot-partition.html
