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minifridge1138

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jun 26, 2010
1,175
197
Once upon a time, I migrated from a HDD to an SSD. When I did it, I cloned my system drive with carbon copy cloner. But I didn’t clone the recovery partition, so there isn’t on on my SSD.

Does anyone have any ideas for how to recreate one on the SSD?
 

davidlv

macrumors 68020
Apr 5, 2009
2,291
874
Kyoto, Japan
Once upon a time, I migrated from a HDD to an SSD. When I did it, I cloned my system drive with carbon copy cloner. But I didn’t clone the recovery partition, so there isn’t on on my SSD.

Does anyone have any ideas for how to recreate one on the SSD?
Installing from a full installer will update the recovery partition.
If that is too much for you, this method works, even though it is old. Originally for El Capitan or older, it works up through Mojave.
See the text below.

Updating your recovery partition. Updating through the mac app store or with the delta or combo update will NOT update the recovery partition.

To make the 10.11.5 recovery partition or later (tested using Mojave, and it worked OK):

1. Download the Lion Recovery Update from https://support.apple.com/kb/dl1464?locale=en_US . Make sure it is in your downloads folder.
2. Download the full installer for El Capitan 10.11.5–macOS Sierra 10.12.1 etc., from the mac app store, right click on it and click Show Package Contents. Go to Contents/SharedSupport/. Copy the InstallESD.dmg file into your Downloads folder.

3. Download and decompress the file recovery.sh.zip from http://4unitmaths.com/recovery.sh.zip and move recovery.sh into your Downloads folder if it's not there already.

4. Open Terminal and type the following commands:

chmod +x ~/Downloads/recovery.sh

sudo ~/Downloads/recovery.sh

Wait a few minutes for it to finish and return back to a prompt. Reboot with holding down the option key to test your new recovery partition.

(If you have core storage you will have to revert it to make the recovery partition show up in the startup manager. Just run these in terminal to revert it if you want to:

diskutil cs list

and then

diskutil coreStorage revert lvUUID

where lvUUID is the last lvUUID reported by the previous Terminal command. Then restart.)
Such as
diskutil coreStorage revert Disk1
 
Last edited:

Fishrrman

macrumors Penryn
Feb 20, 2009
28,376
12,491
From my archives:
(I'm just posting everything I have, including a couple of Applescripts):


 

Attachments

  • Recovery Partition Creator 4.0.4.zip
    82.6 KB · Views: 295
  • Recovery Partition Creator 3.8.zip
    3.9 MB · Views: 309

brianmowrey

macrumors 6502
Oct 5, 2020
419
133
Isn't a new Recovery partition created when you Option-⌘-R into Internet Recovery? I assumed that then functioned as the current Recovery partition (where ⌘-R will boot to, going forward) until you reinstall or upgrade OS?
 

Fishrrman

macrumors Penryn
Feb 20, 2009
28,376
12,491
"Well now I’ll be left curious whether Internet Recovery for sure replaces/creates the Recovery Partition until the next time I erase both my drives."

Internet recovery is a feature that only became available on Macs from 2011 onward.
EXCEPTION: SOME (not all) Macs from 2010 can use internet recovery. I believe 2010 MacBook Pros can use it, but only after a firmware update.

If it's a 2009 or earlier Mac, it's just not gonna do internet recovery. Impossible.
 

FarmerBob

macrumors 6502
Aug 15, 2004
313
103
Don't trust Carbon Copy Cloner when copying Boot Volumes. Try running Onyx on the volume. That's how I fixed my corrupt copies.
 

minifridge1138

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jun 26, 2010
1,175
197
Don't trust Carbon Copy Cloner when copying Boot Volumes. Try running Onyx on the volume. That's how I fixed my corrupt copies.
Carbon Copy Cloner did a fantastic job. Nothing was corrupt.

it was 100% intentional at the time. I only cloned the boot partition to the new SSD because at the time I had multiple copies of OS X installed on different drives. So I didn’t need or want to waste SSD space.
 

yosef019

macrumors newbie
Apr 27, 2022
23
4
Installing from a full installer will update the recovery partition.
If that is too much for you, this method works, even though it is old. Originally for El Capitan or older, it works up through Mojave.
See the text below.

Updating your recovery partition. Updating through the mac app store or with the delta or combo update will NOT update the recovery partition.

To make the 10.11.5 recovery partition or later (tested using Mojave, and it worked OK):

1. Download the Lion Recovery Update from https://support.apple.com/kb/dl1464?locale=en_US . Make sure it is in your downloads folder.
2. Download the full installer for El Capitan 10.11.5–macOS Sierra 10.12.1 etc., from the mac app store, right click on it and click Show Package Contents. Go to Contents/SharedSupport/. Copy the InstallESD.dmg file into your Downloads folder.

3. Download and decompress the file recovery.sh.zip from http://4unitmaths.com/recovery.sh.zip and move recovery.sh into your Downloads folder if it's not there already.

4. Open Terminal and type the following commands:

chmod +x ~/Downloads/recovery.sh

sudo ~/Downloads/recovery.sh

Wait a few minutes for it to finish and return back to a prompt. Reboot with holding down the option key to test your new recovery partition.

(If you have core storage you will have to revert it to make the recovery partition show up in the startup manager. Just run these in terminal to revert it if you want to:

diskutil cs list

and then

diskutil coreStorage revert lvUUID

where lvUUID is the last lvUUID reported by the previous Terminal command. Then restart.)
Such as
diskutil coreStorage revert Disk1
hello ho to do that on ventura 13.2 ? sory for revive the post
 

anshuvorty

macrumors 68040
Sep 1, 2010
3,369
4,843
California, USA
"Well now I’ll be left curious whether Internet Recovery for sure replaces/creates the Recovery Partition until the next time I erase both my drives."

Internet recovery is a feature that only became available on Macs from 2011 onward.
EXCEPTION: SOME (not all) Macs from 2010 can use internet recovery. I believe 2010 MacBook Pros can use it, but only after a firmware update.

If it's a 2009 or earlier Mac, it's just not gonna do internet recovery. Impossible.
man, it's insane that Apple invented this technology waaaaay before it was introduced on Windows! During this time period, you still had to create a bootable DVD/flash drive, and then boot from it, to recover from an OS boot failure.
 

01tepo

macrumors newbie
Apr 13, 2023
1
0
bumping an old post, but is some sense it's cleanest one I have found for this matter.
few questions ahead of me actually doing (and breaking things) to better understand the process:

  • firstly, you one is supposed download `Lion Recovery Update`, here i wonder why it is Lion's recovery update? Is there the same thing for High Sierra (that I want to be mine recovery version) ? I did not find it...
  • int the script you attached, it "InstallESD.dmg" some equivalent if `InstallAssistant.pkg` ?

    my case is complicated: iMac12,2 that has OSx Lion by default (unsupported for long now) -> install Olarila High Sierra -> install Monterey with OpenCore and I am missing recovery. I say missing, but it seems the disk partition is in place, it just doesnt work (CMD+R leads me to the internet recovery). I need `csrutil` so I need some newer recovery and well...local recovery at all..
so can we adapt the process and revive it a bit?

Thanks±!
 
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