Recovery partition required?! (Find My Mac)

Hi Jay,

First, is your Mac a Mac Pro or a Macbook Pro and is it under warranty? If you go to the Apple logo at top left, select About this Mac / System report / Hardware you will find Model identifier.

Beginning with the OS X 10.7 Lion, there has been a Recovery partition in the OS.

To see this, disconnect any external drives and open the Terminal app, which is in Utilities. To get there, click on your desktop, which takes you to Finder, then on Go in the top menu bar, then Utilities. When you open Terminal, type or paste in Diskutil list (just like that and with a space between the words) and a list will appear of all disks and partitions on you Mac. There should be one called Apple_Boot Recovery HD there.

I solved this problem in a rather unconventional way:

I had this problem after I installed two OSX version on my internal disk: One with 10.10 and one with 10.12. When booting into 10.12, "Find My Mac" would not work due to "Recovery partition required".

Using Terminal, along with "diskutil list" and "diskutil mount ..." to mount the recovery partition it listed, I looked into the "SystemVersion.plist" file of the now-mounted "Recovery HD" and realized that the recovery disk was for 10.10, not for 10.12, and that was the culprit.

So the task was to install a recovery partition specifically for 10.12. Since I had another Mac with 10.12 installed, I copied the recovery partition from that disk, using the free program iBored (of which I am the author), and then wrote it over the outdated 10.10 recovery partition. After a reboot, I was finally able to use "Find My Mac".

I admit that doing what I did requires quite a good understanding of how disks and blocks and partitions work. Otherwise, you either won't get far, or may even damage you disk's data if you happen to overwrite the wrong blocks.

But still, I wanted to leave this note here for others who want to troubleshoot this and understand what I am talking about. Good luck!

Jay,

If Find My Mac is dimmed and you see 'Recovery system update required' - Apple Support explains your options.

Jay,

Sounds like a trip to the store may be justified.

Your screenshot says "Recovery partition required." Nothing about update. If your OS was restored from a Superduper clone there will be no Recovery partition. To check, use Terminal and type in diskutil list If there is no Apple_Boot Recovery HD in the list, you will have to reinstall the OS to get it.

Jay3000 wrote:

Can you explain how do find this and do this, sorry I am new to macs.

Redownload OS X El Capitan from the App Store and go through the install process. This will write the Recovery HD for you.

Yes. That's the easiest way. Do a back up of your system first. The reinstall will NOT harm your accounts/data or apps. It just installs the OS over itself. Afterwards you will want to run Software Update to reapply any OS X updates.

Check App Store / Purchases. There should be an item there for El Capitan. I'm assuming you previously downloaded it from the App Store Since your 1st post has 10.11.3 as your OS.