Yosemite recovery partition - gone?

The Recovery Partition is still there; it simply no longer appears in Startup Manager. The usual method for booting OS X Recovery still applies.

How did you make that determination?

Have you tried doing a restart holding the Option key? You should see all bootable volumes, including the recovery drive. Mine shows up there.

My Recover Partition is missing too, not just from the Startup Manager, but from startup screen (holding down the option key) as well.

Boot your computer up using Command+R

this should fix the issue.

If it is still not there I would suggest reinstallation.

Jesse Merino wrote:

My Recover Partition is missing too, not just from the Startup Manager, but from startup screen (holding down the option key) as well.

That is Startup Manager. The Recovery Partition no longer appears as a separate volume in Startup Manager.

I read somewhere that if you enable FileVault during or after the install, the recovery partition will no longer show up if you hold the option key during bootup. The reason being that FileVault uses it as a way to boot securely into your encrypted drive. The recovery partition is still there you just won't see it. You'll have to disable FileVault in order to see it again.

Check to see if you have FileVault turned on?

You can see your recovery partition in Terminal.app

diskutil list

On most portables, a yosemite install will convert your hard drive or SSD into a core storage volume. A core storage volume is used for things like fusion drives and more importantly file vault encryption. When you have a core storage volume, holding the alt key will NOT give you boot options to select your main drive or recovery partition. Recovery is still there but not as a separate partition. Now you must hold the command-R key to access recovery.

It is possible to revert the CS volume back to a normal volume if you haven't encrypted it yet. You didn't ask about that so I won't go into details.

Got this problem too, after finish install new os Yosemite.

On terminal use diskutil list command return this result:

/dev/disk0

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *480.1 GB disk0

1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1

2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 418.5 GB disk0s2

3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3

4: Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP 60.8 GB disk0s4

But hold down option key during startup, in Startup Manager there have three partitions just no Recovery HD there, but why is "EFI Boot" show up? 😕

PS: The file vault is turned on when i try to install Yosemite. and face some problems during first installation. and third time is ok, now file vault is off.

Run these 2 commands in a terminal.

diskutil cs list

and then

diskutil coreStorage revert lvUUID

where lvUUID is the last lvUUID reported by the previous Terminal command.

Then restart for everything to get back to normal after you have run these commands in Terminal.

Then also the recovery partition will show up again in the startup manager when you boot up with the option key.

henrik-kna,

YOU are the man! Even thought I could have just used the Command-R to get to the Recovery Partition, I prefer the Option key at boot method and that Terminal sequence worked!

Thanks!

So, same problem here which I was able to solve with henrik-kna's solution. My question is why did Apple make the change in the first place and what have I done to my system by reverting it back to original?

My educated guess is that since I didn't select to use FileVault, for some reason a flag was set. Now, this happened on my wife's MacBook Air (4,2). This did not happen on my iMac (7,1), Mac mini (6,2), or MacBook Pro (5,1).

My assumption is that since I didn't choose to use FileVault, a flag was set. Using the Terminal commands, DiskUtil reset the flag to a "normal" volume and not a CoreStorage volume. And by using the lvUUID, we're specifying the logical volume, specifically the Recovery Volume, by its Universally Unique IDentifier.

Hi henrik-hna:

I have follow the command you give, but it return "No CoreStorage logical volume groups found" and "Unable to find disk for lvUUID"

PS: I'm using third party SSD