I deleted the Recovery Partition

I thought that, too. But I've had recovery partitions on more than one drive at the same time before. Essentially, anytime you have more than one physical drive and you install OS X on it, that drive will get a Recovery partition installed.

I was curious about Windows because on older Mac models (like my 2010 Mac Pro), a Recovery partition cannot be created if Windows is already occupying the last part of the drive. Newer Macs will put the Recovery partition wherever it will fit.

Per my drives (I have three installed), the drive with the El Capitan partition did not get a Recovery partition created because Windows was already there. No matter how many times I install OS X, or which version, it can't create one. In fact, the OS X installer starts right out with a message that "Not all features will be available". There's no Recovery partition on the SSD drive with Yosemite on it because I manually removed it.

First, make a complete backup of your drive. Then boot into Internet Recovery Mode by restarting and holding the Command+Option+R keys. This starts the Mac up via firmware rather than the drive. Choose to install OS X. That will reinstall the OS and create a new Recovery partition at the same time.

That's weird. Reinstalling any version of OS X from Lion forward should always create a Recovery partition if there isn't one already.

Dumb question maybe, but are you sure it's not there? If you restart and hold the Option key, is there no choice of a Recovery partition?

Next question. Do you have Windows installed to a Boot Camp partition?

There are couple of ways to get your Recovery HD back on.

1) Re-download OS X El Capitan 10.11.1 and install it over itself.

2) Re-download OS X El Capitan 10.11.1 or if you still have the Install OS X El Capitan.app file then use this utility to recreate your Recovery HD. There are prompts to guide you and the utility needs the installer file. I have used this many times after cloning to add back the Recovery HD. NOTE: if your OS X volume is CoreStorage, you will need to revert it back to the native file type.

Ripi2 wrote:

This utility did u sent doesn't work on El Capitan

If the utility suggested by keg55 is not working for you try this alternative one

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

It does not mention having been updated for El Capitan but I have used it for all previous OS X versions many times.

You appeared to be doing the right things i.e. dragging the El Capitan installer in to the window of that utility. I could see the spinning progress indicator in the bottom left corner of the utility did you leave it running long enough to be sure it had failed?

If it really had failed then it must also be needing to be updated for El Capitan compatibility.

Thank you! I installed an SSD in my MacBook Pro (moved the HDD to the optical drive slot and made the SSD my primary) and using SuperDuper! to clone got me a great copy - but deleted my recovery partition.

It's back now!

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *250.1 GB disk0

1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1

2: Apple_CoreStorage Samsung SSD 850 EVO ... 249.2 GB disk0s2

3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3

I had previously tried the application John Lockwood suggested, only to have it tell me “The command exited with a non-zero status”. So this is fantastic. Thank you!!

Kurt,

I may be wrong but if you have another OS partition either before the OS 10.11 partition or another drive with a recovery partition it won't make the recovery partition for 10.11

Ripi2 wrote:

This utility did u sent doesn't work on El Capitan

Yes, it does. I have used it before with El Capitan.