Mac Recovery Hard Drive volume is a drive you can boot to and use the disk utility to correct issues in HD. There are two methods use in creating recovery HD volume depending on your Mac model.These methods are Through OS X Yosemite and OS X El Captitan.
What you Need to make Mac Recovery HD volume
- You might have a working hard drive volume on your Mac Startup drive
- In absence of the recovery HD volume, you can create bootable copy of the Mac OS installer
Create a mac Recovery HD on OS X Lion
You can perform this act using the OS X Yosemite method. The first thing is to make the hidden recovery HDvolume visible in other to clone it. For the OS X Yosemite method you can use the disk utility which is embedded with a hidden debug menu that can be used to unhide partitions.
Enable disk utility’s Debug menu
- If disk utility is open, close it
- Open terminal at applications/utilities
- Key in this command “defaults write com.apple.diskutilityDUDebugMenuEnable1”
- Tap on the “Enter” Key and then close terminal. So if you open disk utility the debug menu is already enabled
Prepare the Destination volume
- Create a partition that is small
- Go to applications and then “utilities” tab
- Open disk utility
- Move to debug menu and select “show every partition”
- In disk utility, click on the “original HD volume ”
- Tap on “restore” widget
- Drag and drop the recovery HD to source field
- Drag the volume you like to use for the new recovery HD to the destination field
- Cross-check if everything is correct, if so, Press on “restore” tab.
- Select “Erase” button and then the cloning begins.
- Wait for the cloning section to complete
Create Mac Recovery HD on OS X El Captitan/newer
- Create a disk image of the recovery HD hidden
- Launch terminal in applications/utilities
- Type in “we need to find the disk identifier for the hidden recovery HD partition”
- Tap “Enter”
- Search for the entry that has “Apple_Boot” and recovery HD name. Your recovery HD identifier might be different but it must have “disk, a number, letter S, and another number.
- In the terminal Enter a command “sudohdiutilcreate ~/Desktop/Recovery\ HD.dmg– srcdevice/dev/DiskIndentifier”
- For Mac OS high Sierra/newer there’s a bug on hduitil command in terminal that doesn’t recognize the backslash (\) for avoiding the space character, thereby causing an error message. so use quotes to avoid “recovery HD.dmg” name
- Click Enter
- Enter password , then tap “Enter”
Create Mac Recovery HD Partition With Disk utility
Firstly, partition the drive that the mac recovery hard drive volume will be created on. Then follow the directives below to clone the recovery HD
- Laugh disk utility
- Select the “partition” you created from the list
- Press on “restore” tab
- Click on “image” widget
- Go to your desktop folder and Locate the “recovery HD.dmg image folder” created before
- Choose “recovery HD.dmg file” then tap “Open”
- From the drop down sheet click on “restore” tab
- Tap on “Done”