Feb 27, 2016 - RELATED: How to create USB install disk for OS X El Capitan. With the recovery tools from a hidden recovery partition on your startup disk.

1. Reinstall Os X Recovery Partition
2. Install Os X From Recovery Partition
3. Clean Install Os X Recovery Partition

Every Mac since the days of OS X Lion has a Recovery partition, a tool that can help you rescue a Mac with a damaged operating system.

However, if you are looking to replace macOS with Linux, you may want to delete this for some extra disk space3 Free Apps to Analyze & Inspect Your Mac's Hard Disk Space3 Free Apps to Analyze & Inspect Your Mac's Hard Disk SpaceWondering where all of your Mac's storage has gone? These free apps will let you know.Read More. You also may want to restore it if you switch back to macOS.

Here’s how to delete or restore your Mac’s recovery partition.

The Basics of the Recovery Partition

When booting up your Mac, you can hold down Command+ R to boot into the Recovery partition of your Mac. If your Mac has a problem, this is your place to access utilities, restore from Time Machine, or as a last resort: get a clean install of macOS.

The main menu offers four options: Restore from Time Machine BackupHow to Restore Data From Time Machine BackupsHow to Restore Data From Time Machine BackupsIt's really easy to set up Time Machine, the backup software that comes with every Mac — but how do you get your files back when things go wrong?Read More, Reinstall macOS, Get Help Online, and Disk Utility. These are self-explanatory, though to look online for help or reinstall macOS, you need to connect your Mac to the internet.

There are additional utilities that aren’t listed but available in a menu item: Firmware Password Utility, Network Utility, and Terminal. If you are using a Mac made after 2010, you can also boot into a network-only Recovery Mode by holding Option + Command+ R to help if you are having an issue with your local disk booting.

Deleting the Recovery Partition

If you have a USB stick with the latest macOS installerHow to Install macOS From USBHow to Install macOS From USBWant to install macOS from a USB drive? We'll walk you through this alternative method for installing macOS.Read More, and want to get around 650 MB of disk space on your Mac back, then you can delete the Recovery Partition.

Even with a backup installer, you want to make sure that you back up all of your data with something like Carbon Copy Cloner, in case something goes wrong. We are all adults here, and if you are okay working without a safety net you do not need to have the USB Drive per se, but you have been warned.

Note: How you proceed will depend on whether you’re using Core Storage or not, so be sure to pay attention to this next bit. Regardless of what you do, a functional backup is very important when you start messing with partitions as things can and do go wrong.

1. Core Storage and a Dirty Hack

Apple introduced Core Storage as part of the Fusion Drive tech.

As a part of the eventual move away from HFS+, Apple has begun to move partitions to Core Storage volumes during the upgrade process to macOS. I hosed my old 2011 Air twice messing around with the Core Storage partition and ended up having to restore from my Time Machine backup.

You can find out if your system drive was converted to Core Storage by entering the following command into Terminal:

If you see that the command lists your system drive with the type AppleCoreStorage, it is not recommended to go forward. Even the power of Terminal does not deal with these partitions very well, and you can easily end up having to restore your Mac from a backup.

There is a solution, but it is a relatively dirty hack. What you can do is create a clone of your drive externally using Carbon Copy ClonerCarbon Copy Cloner - A Free & Powerful Backup Utility (Mac)Carbon Copy Cloner - A Free & Powerful Backup Utility (Mac)Read More. If you do not already have it installed, download it here.

After that, plug in your USB drive and open Disk Utility. Click on the USB drive and select Erase. Name the drive, and then set the format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and set the scheme to GUID Partition Map.

Once you format your disk correctly, open Carbon Copy Cloner. You should be prompted to create your first job, if you are not select New Task from the File menu. Select your Mac’s system drive as the source and your newly formatted system drive as the destination. You can select Done and kick off the copy.

The wait may vary based on the size of your system, so you may want to make some coffee or tea while you wait. When it is complete, shut down your Mac and boot up holding the Option key to select your boot disk. Select your USB drive to boot from, and you should boot into your same system.

Once you are back into macOS, open the Computer folder from Finder and make sure that you eject your Mac’s disk. Then open the Disk Utility. Repeat the steps to erase your system disk with the single partition. Then, reverse the Carbon Copy Cloner job to restore your drive.

When Carbon Copy Cloner asks if you want to include a Recovery Partition, answer No. Now your Mac no longer has the Recovery Partition.

2. Terminal

Reinstall Os X Recovery Partition

If your Mac still has an older style partition table, the easiest way to delete your recovery partition is to use TerminalThese 6 Awesome Terminal Commands Will Boost Your MacBookThese 6 Awesome Terminal Commands Will Boost Your MacBookYou can only cram so much into graphical user interface before it becomes cluttered, so it should come as no big surprise that you can do some really cool things using the Mac Terminal.Read More, though your account needs to have admin rights for this to work. Find your Recovery partition using the command:

This command is the Terminal version of Disk Utility, and list gives you a list of all your disks and their partitions. You want to be careful here, as you do not want to delete the wrong partition unintentionally. Look for the partition, probably at the bottom of the list, Recovery HD. You will want to delete this and merge it into your main partition. To do so first delete the partition using the command:

This command deletes the Recovery partition and replaces it with blank space. Make sure that your Recovery HD partition is listed as disk0s3. If it is not, change the command to match your disk. There are now two partitions on the disk: our normal system disk and a new blank partition. For the next step, we need to combine the two, leaving our drive as a single partition. That is a simple command:

This command merges the two preserving all of the data on your system disk. Be sure to double check those volume labels against your own disks to avoid losing data. Even doing everything right when messing with partition tables, something can go awry. Be sure that you are not working without a backup.

You can now list your partitions again and see that your disk is one partition for your system disk and an EFI boot partition. Now that you have your disk how you want it, the challenge becomes keeping it that way.

Restoring Your Recovery Partition

One of the easiest ways to have the Recovery partition restore itself is to update macOS. Unfortunately, that means that it might come back even when you do not want it. If you removed it altogether, this can be problematic.

There isn’t an option when applying updates, so you need to repeat the steps to ensure that you are safe. If you switched to Linux and are using just the hardwareBuying MacBooks For Penguins: Linux on Apple HardwareBuying MacBooks For Penguins: Linux on Apple HardwareYou'd probably think that the free open source operating system Linux wouldn't mix too well with Apple's proprietary, controlling approach when it comes to hardware — but you'd be wrong.Read More, this became a lot easier. You can just delete or ignore macOS and go about your business.

If you’re looking to restore it without having to donwload updates, you may want to repeat the Carbon Copy Cloner steps in the section on Core Storage partitions. Just where it says to select No, select Create Recovery Volume.

Taking Control of your Hardware

As any long time Mac user can tell you11 Quick Fixes for Common Mac Problems and Quirks11 Quick Fixes for Common Mac Problems and QuirksDid you know many of the common Mac issues and quirks that users report can be fixed simply by changing a few settings?Read More, messing around with the deeper levels of macOS is difficult. Removing the Recovery partition is not any different. Make a backup and be careful before trying anything in this article, we would not want you to lose data.

Have you ditched your recovery partition? Tell us why!

Explore more about: Data Recovery, Disk Partition, macOS Sierra, Terminal.

1. Following the instructions carefully (no CoreStorage on my system) and this did not work. In terminal after running this command (diskutil eraseVolume JHFS+ Blank disk0s3) I get the following error:

   Started erase on disk0s3 Recovery HD
   Unmounting disk
   Error: -69874: Couldn't modify partition map

2. hello, how to get the recovery portion back?

   now we have:
   /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_HFS Macintosh HD 289.9 GB disk0s2
   3: Apple_HFS Subsidiary 699.7 GB disk0s3
   4: Apple_HFS Recovery HD 10.2 GB disk0s4
   but disk0S4 is visible in Finder and does not contain the recovery HD at all, it was manually edited in terminal after some greater partition issues.

3. Please fix this: merge command lacks partition name before disk0s2 and disk0s3 parameters. For this example:
   diskUtil mergeParitions JHFS+ Guest__OSX disk0s2 disk0s3

4. Hmmm.. I entered a comment, put in my name and email, clicked 'Post Comment' and my comment disappeared but my name and email remain. Did my comment get sent? I can't tell. So I'm sending this to see if I missed something.

   • Never mind, I see it. I just don't have the patience.. ;-)

5. I have a MBAir with a 128GB drive, MacOS Sierra. DiskUtil shows I have:
   #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
   0: GUID_partition_scheme *121.3 GB disk0
   1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
   2: Apple_CoreStorage Macintosh HD 120.5 GB disk0s2
   3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3
   This seems to indicate that the actual size of my SSD is 256GB. If I use the CCCloner method shown above and completely erase the SSD, I should then, in theory, have use of a 256GB drive for the cost of a 128GB. Seems logical to me, what do you think?

   The only fly in the ointment I see is that, when I reinstall Sierra, will it create a new CoreStorage partition? Thus leaving me with my original 128GB drive.

   Another thought is that when Apple does finally move from HFS+, they won't need a separate CoreStorage partition, so I could then use that for other purposes. Maybe. We can only hope. Exorcist raid tools.

Apple has made the installation process for OS X Lion (10.7) slightly different than it was for previous versions of the operating system. Even with the differences, you can still create a clean installation of Lion on an internal drive, a partition, an external drive, or a USB flash drive.

This step-by-step article looks at installing Lion on a drive or partition, either internally on your Mac or on an external drive. For those of you who want to create a bootable USB flash drive with Lion installed, check out the guide: Create an Emergency Mac OS Boot Device Using a USB Flash Drive.

Install Os X From Recovery Partition

What You Need to Install Lion

Purchase Lion from the Apple Store online. You receive a content code to the Mac App Store, usually within one day. After you download the installer, copy it to any Mac that meets the minimum hardware requirements and install Lion. The Lion installer is downloaded to your Applications folder, and it is just under 4 GB in size. The system requirements are:

• Intel Core 2 Duo, i3, i5, Core i7 or Xeon processor
• Mac OS X Snow Leopard v10.6.6 or later (v10.6.8 is recommended)
• 7 GB of free hard drive space
• 2 GB of RAM

You can install Lion on any internal drive, including SSDs (solid state drives). Also, you can install Lion on any external drive that is connected to your Mac by USB 2.x, USB 3, FireWire 400/800, or Thunderbolt. An eSATA-based external drive probably won't work as a bootable installation destination because most add-on eSATA controllers don't support booting OS X.

The Lion Recovery partition takes 650 MB of the free space. The Lion installer creates two partitions, one for Lion and one for recovery tools. You can use the Recovery Partition to repair drives, fix permissions, and format drives, as well as reinstall Lion if needed. The Recovery Partition includes a bootable system with Disk Utility.

Clean Install Preparation

To perform a clean install of Lion, you must have a disk or partition available that uses the GUID Partition Table and is formatted with the Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) file system. The target volume should be erased at best; at a minimum, it should not contain any OS X system.

With previous versions of OS X installers, you could erase the target drive as part of the installation process. With the Lion installer, there are two methods of performing a clean install. One method requires you to create a bootable Lion install DVD, and the second lets you perform a clean install using the Lion installer you downloaded from the Mac App Store.

The difference between the two methods is that to use the Lion installer directly, you must have a drive or partition that you can erase before running the installer. Using a bootable Lion install DVD allows you to erase a drive or partition as part of the installation process.

If you want to use your current startup drive as the target for a clean install, you need to the use the bootable Lion install DVD method as outlined in Lion Install - Use a Bootable Lion DVD to Perform a Clean Install.

If you're going to perform a clean install of Lion on a drive other than your current startup drive, then you're ready to proceed.

Perform a Backup

Before you begin the Lion installation process, back up your existing OS X system and user data. Performing a clean install on a separate drive or partition shouldn't cause any data loss with your current system, but stranger things have happened, and it is best to be prepared.

At a minimum, make sure you have a current backup. For more protection, make a bootable clone of your current startup drive. You can find the method here: Back Up Your Mac: Time Machine and SuperDuper Make for Easy Backups.

If you would rather use Carbon Copy Cloner, you will find the developer makes older versions of the app available that work with OS X Snow Leopard and Lion.

Format the Destination Drive

You must erase the target drive before you can start the Lion installation process. Remember that to use the Lion installer as downloaded from the Mac App Store, you must have a working copy of OS X to start the installer from. You may need to create a new partition to install to or resize existing partitions to create the necessary space.

If you need instructions for adding, formatting, or resizing a drive's partitions, you can find them here: Disk Utility - Add, Delete, and Resize Existing Volumes With Disk Utility

Use the OS X Lion Installer

Before you start the Lion installer, close all other applications that are currently running on your Mac.

The Lion installer is located in the Applications folder, and the file is named Install Mac OS X Lion. The download process from the Mac App Store also created an Install Mac OS X Lion icon in your Dock.

1. Start the Lion installation process by clicking the Lion installer Dock icon, or double-clicking the Install Mac OS X Lion application in the Applications folder.
2. Click Continue in the window that opens.
3. Scroll through the terms of use and click Agree.
4. The Lion installer assumes you want to install Lion on the current startup drive. To select a different target drive, click Show All Disks and select the target disk from the list (the disk you erased earlier).
5. With the target disk highlighted, click Install.
6. Enter your admin username and password to begin the installation process and click OK.
7. Wait while the Lion installer copies the necessary files to the target disk. When the copying is finished, you are prompted to restart your Mac. Click Restart.

After your Mac restarts, the installation process continues. A progress bar displays along with an estimate of the time it will take to complete the installation. Installation speed ranges from 10 to 30 minutes.

Note: If you have multiple displays connected to your Mac, turn all of them on before you begin the Lion installation process. The installer may display the progress bar on a display other than your usual main screen; if that display isn't on, you'll wonder what's happening.

OS X Lion Setup Assistant

When the installation of OS X Lion is complete, your Mac displays a Welcome window, which marks the start of the registration and setup process for Lion.

Clean Install Os X Recovery Partition

1. In the Welcome window, select the country or region where you use your Mac and click Continue.
2. A list of keyboard styles displays. Select the type that matches yours and click Continue.

Migration Assistant

Because this is a clean install of OS X Lion, you can use the Migration Assistant to transfer data from another Mac, PC, Time Machine, or another disk or partition on your Mac.

However, it is better not to use the Migration Assistant at this point, opting instead for a clean installation of Lion. After you know Lion is installed and working correctly, run the Migration Assistant from the Lion installation to move any user data you need to the Lion disk. You can find the Migration Assistant in the Utilities folder inside the Applications folder.

Registration

Registration is optional. You can click through the next two screens if you want. If you do fill in the registration information, some of the applications you use in Lion are pre-populated with appropriate data. Specifically, Mail and Address Book will already have your primary email account information partially set up, and Address Book will have your personal entry already created.

Enter your Apple account information, and click Continue to open a window that requests information. You aren't required to enter it. When you're finished, or if you prefer not to register, click Continue.

Administrator Account

Lion requires at least one administrator account to be set up. You can use the administrator account to perform most Lion housekeeping tasks, to create additional users, and to install any applications that require administrator privileges.

1. When prompted for the administrator account name, enter your name.
2. Enter your shortname, which is a shortcut name used for the administrator account and the name of the account's home directory. Shortnames cannot be changed, so be sure you're happy with the name you enter. You'll be living with it for a long time.
3. Enter the password you want to use, along with any additional information requested and then click Continue.
4. You can associate an image or picture with the account you're creating. If you have a webcam connected to your Mac, you can snap a picture of yourself to use. You can also choose one of many pictures already installed in Lion. Make your selection, and click Continue.

Learning to Scroll

The Lion Setup Assistant is just about done. The final step shows you how to use the new touch-based gesture system in Lion. Depending on the type of touch-based input device you have (Magic Mouse, Magic Trackpad, or integrated trackpad), you see a description of how to scroll. Follow the instructions to scroll down through the text area, and click the Start Using Mac OS X Lion button.

Just One More Thing

That's it. You can start exploring Lion, but before you head off, use the Software Update service to ensure that you have all the latest patches, device drivers, and other undercover goodies your Mac may need to perform at its best. From the Apple menu, select Software Update, and then follow the onscreen instructions.