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.

Click on Download to the right of that line.

If the right hand side says Downloaded (like below) then you have it in your /Applications folder. If this is the case, I would delete it out of the /Applications folder and redownload it as there was a certificates issue a few weeks back that require it to be downloaded again to use the new certificate. Otherwise, It may fail the installation with less than a minute to go.

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.

You have no Recovery HD on your system. You want to use Find My Mac which requires a Recovery HD on your system.

Yes, your system is fine without the Recovery HD except when you want to use Find My Mac, repair your Macintosh HD outside of OS X, reinstall OS X after erasing your Macintosh HD, etc. You can definitely wait until you can use something other than your phone to download OS X.

Are you quite sure you really have no Recovery Partition? I, too, was getting this notice when I tried to set up Find My Mac, yet I know I had a Recovery Partition. Perhaps it's too late, (or maybe this can help someone else), but before you go and reinstall the system, I'd check whether the Recovery Partition exists. You can do this by opening Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app and when the prompt appears, type:

diskutil list

You should see something like:

~ $ diskutil list

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk0

1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1

2: Apple_CoreStorage Thee HD 999.3 GB disk0s2

3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3

~ $

Apple_Boot Recovery HD being the key thing. If you see that, then you have a Recovery Partition.

Or, you can simply restart and hold down the < command + r > keys and see if it boots into the recovery disk. If the Recovery Partition exists, and I suspect it does, then you have a different issue. If you restored from SuperDuper, as someone mentioned, it should not have affected the Recovery Partition.

What solved this problem for me was that I'd created a Recovery Partition on a USB stick for Disk Warrior, (and had it mounted on the Desktop). Once I'd unmounted that, my iCloud Settings were then able to recognize the original Recovery Partition. I don't know if this is possible, but if you somehow cloned all of your hard drive onto an external disk, including the Recovery Partition, having this mounted might be confusing to Settings. Try unmounting, then disconnecting, any external drives. Then see if the original Recovery Partition is recognized.

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.