What happened to my recovery partition?
I have a late 2012 iMac that has been upgraded to Mavericks. Recently I was fiddling around with Disk Utility and was surprised to discover the recovery partition was nowhere to be found. I understood that this partition was automatically created when Mavericks installed, in case of problems in the future. Did I forget to tick a box somewhere? Or has something happened to erase my recovery partition? And, more importantly, how can I get it back? Jon Alderton The recovery partition is indeed created when Mavericks installs; unless you’ve done something to mess with the normal partition structure of your hard disk before you install. It won’t create a recovery partition on a RAID volume for example, or a Boot Camp partition you’ve edited. But the recovery partition is normally hidden, so you won’t see it from Disk Utility, unless you have the debug menu enabled. You can list the recovery partition from Terminal with the ‘ command, but it’s simplest to boot with å held down and see if it shows up as an available boot partitions. If it doesn’t, repair it by reinstalling Mavericks. Click Purchased in the App Store and you see your previous Mavericks download still available. Running it recreates the Recovery Partition. Or, you can download Recovery Disk Assistant (bit.ly/1pGJkNp) and use this to create an external Recovery volume on a USB drive or memory stick.
However, the recovery partition isn’t your only safety net. Even if your hard disk dies, taking the recovery partition with it, your Mac boots into Internet Recovery mode. Provided you have an internet connection, you can run OS X Recovery from Apple’s servers. The external recovery disk option is there for older Macs that don’t support Internet Recovery.