I have HD corruption, and need to boot to my hidden drive and run disk utility, which is NOT possible in Yosemite. Is there another way to run disk utility on my internal HD, than creating an external boot drive of an old OS?
MacBook Pro (13-inch Early 2011), OS X Mavericks (10.9)
If the hard drive is that badly corrupted, Yosemite isn't the reason you can't boot to the Recovery partition, the corruption is.
Instead, restart and hold down Command+Option+R to boot into Internet Recovery. That starts up to the firmware, not the hard drive. You'll be able to run Disk Utility from there.
So here is the result of your advice. I restarted to: Command + Option+Recovery, the machine then loaded the recovery from the Cloud and took 20 minutes using fast internet, how do I know it is the internet, because apple put the rotating earth as the boot up symbol. I repaired the disk, then chose a reboot disk and the boot partition still does not show, so I booted to the repaired drive.
I don't believe my old Mavericks recovery partition is available anymore, nor for anyone, nor for you. I looked up on the internet and found nobody has a converted mavericks recovery partition converted into a Yosemite partition. So, is there a correction you would like to post? As I am little irritated that you got TWO things wrong in your advise. Here is just one of hundreds of links that talks about the missing recovery partition: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/151072/missing-yosemite-recovery-partit ion
So, is there a correction you would like to post? As I am little irritated that you got TWO things wrong in your advise.
So how is it wrong? You were able to do exactly as I stated. You successfully started up in Internet Recovery and attempted to repair the disk with Disk Utility. Unfortunately, it didn't work. I never guaranteed you'd be able to actually fix the drive, just that you would be able to try it that way.
I don't believe my old Mavericks recovery partition is available anymore, nor for anyone, nor for you. I looked up on the internet and found nobody has a converted mavericks recovery partition converted into a Yosemite partition.
The Mavericks recovery partition is gone. That's what should happen when you upgrade to Yosemite; just as it did from Lion to Mountain Lion, or either of those to Mavericks. The hidden recovery partition gets upgraded to the same OS you're installing so they match.
Yes, there are instances where the recovery partition will not be created. The link you have is one of them, and is the same on my Mac. It does depend on how old a Mac is, and what firmware it has. On mine, the firmware always wants to put the recovery partition at the end of the drive. But like the example in your link, the Windows partition is already sitting there. Since the Mac OS can't write, and therefore modify an NTFS partition, it can't make room for the recovery partition, and it won't put it above the NTFS partition. So I get none. Not that I need it. Newer Macs will put the recovery partition wherever it can make room, regardless of the existence of a Windows NTFS partition.
So you're currently stuck with a drive that is damaged beyond repair. Assuming it isn't physically bad, it appears you'll have to do an Internet Recovery startup again and use Disk Utility to erase the drive. You'll then be able to install the original OS the Mac came with, whatever that was. You will of course lose everything currently on the drive.
If you have an external drive, I believe you can choose to install OS X to that during an Internet Recovery boot. I can't verify that since I don't have any Macs yet capable of booting to Command+Option+R. If it does allow you to install OS X to any drive it sees, then installing to an external drive will allow to then boot to that drive when the install is complete. From there, you can hope the internal drive will show up in the list of available drives so you at least can copy personal data off of it before erasing and reinstalling the OS there.
Yosemite: How do I boot to Disk Utility???
