Recovery Partition Creator Catalina

At a glance

If you cannot boot, create a bootable installer USB for Catalina and boot with that by holding Option key. Then mount the internal disk, run a first aid in Disk Utility on the internal disk. Copy / Paste the diskutil info. Suspect recovery mode partition is damaged or missing. – James Brickley Nov 1 '20 at 15:03.

Our Verdict

• For versions of OS X and macOS from Lion 10.7 and up, there’s a script called Recovery Partition Creator that will non-destructively put a recovery partition back on your Mac without you having.
• On some older Mac’s, Internet recovery is done with key combo shift + option + command ⌘ + r. In this case, we will update the recovery partition on our MacBook Pro 2011 from the default 10.7 Lion recovery partition to the High Sierra recovery partition 10.13.6. Download the latest Mac OS High Sierra installation from the App Store.
• How to create recovery partition for a previous version of MacOS? I installed Catalina as dev beta and as you might have guessed, the recovery partition is now based on Catalina. However, I'd like to recreate a Mojave partition.

One of the best features introduced in Lion (OS X 10.7), and available on every version of OS X since, is OS X Recovery. The OS X installer creates an invisible, bootable, 650MB partition—a portion of a drive that the operating system treats as a separate volume—on your startup drive called Recovery HD that includes a few essential utilities for fixing problems, restoring files, browsing the Web, and even reinstalling OS X.

The Lion, Mountain Lion, and Mavericks installers should automatically create the invisible Recovery HD partition the first time you install one of these operating systems. However, that doesn’t always happen. You can find out if your Mac has the Recovery HD partition—and, thus, OS X Recovery capabilities—by launching the Terminal app (in /Applications/Utilities), and then typing diskutil list and pressing Return. Locate your Mac’s startup drive in the resulting list of volumes; if you have a Recovery HD partition, it will show up as “Recovery HD” (preceded by “Apple_Boot”) just below the name of the startup drive. If you don’t see a Recovery HD partition on your Mac’s startup drive, you can’t use OS X Recovery.

(Another situation where you may need to add a Recovery HD partition is when you have an external drive you use for clone backups and you want to enable FileVault on it—a drive must have a Recovery HD partition to use FileVault.)

If you don’t have a Recovery HD partition, Apple’s official procedure for adding one is to back up your drive, erase it to make sure it’s properly formatted, reinstall OS X—which should create the hidden partition—and then restore your data.

But an easier approach is to use the free Recovery Partition Creator (more info here). This app can create the partition and even install the necessary OS X Recovery software on it. You just need to have a copy of your OS X installer—Mavericks, Mountain Lion, or Lion—on a connected drive.

Warning: Recovery Partition Creator alters your drive’s partition map, which isn’t a trivial action.Beforeusing the utility, youmustback up your drive (and test your backup). I didn’t experience any data issues when testing Recovery Partition Creator, but whenever you use a utility that works with your drive at such a low level, you want to be safe.

Launch Recovery Partition Creator, read the disclaimer (which also reminds you to back up your drive—you did, right?), and click OK. You’ll then see a dialog box indicating the version of OS X installed on your Mac. Assuming it’s some version of 10.7, 10.8, or 10.9, you’ll see the message “continuing”; click OK. Next you’ll be prompted to choose the connected volume on which you want to create the recovery partition—presumably, this would be your startup drive, but you can also use Recovery Partition Creator to create the partition on a different drive. Choose the drive and click OK.

Recovery Partition Creator will next check your drive for errors. You can skip this step, but I recommend letting it continue—you don’t want a utility mucking with your drive’s partition map if the drive or its directory is having problems.

You’ll then be asked to locate your OS X installer. Because Recovery Partition Creator will use the chosen installer to populate the new partition with the necessary OS X Recovery software, you’ll want to choose the installer for the version of OS X you’re running on your Mac. In other words, if your Mac is running Mavericks, you want to choose the Mavericks installer. Oddly, even though you’ve just chosen the installer, you’re asked to choose the OS version you’re going to install on the recovery partition. Click the correct version (10.7 or 10.8 is one choice, 10.9 is the other), and Recovery Partition Creator will begin repartitioning the drive and installing the necessary software.

The description here makes Recovery Partition Creator seem more complicated than it actually is. In practice, the steps are quick and mostly straightforward. However, the utility is an AppleScript-based app, which means you don’t get much feedback about what’s happening. Eventually—after a minute or so, or a few minutes, depending on the speed of your drive(s)—you’ll see an alert that the procedure was successful. (If you switched to another app to work while Recovery Partition Creator was doing its thing, this alert may be hidden behind other windows.) You can then quit the utility.

If you want to verify that Recovery Partition Creator did what it promised, you can open Terminal and repeat the diskutil list command. The drive in question should now show a Recovery HD partition.

I’ve tested Recovery Partition Creator on a number of drives—for example, my iMac, which somehow never got one despite many OS X installations, and a couple backup drives for which I wanted to enable FileVault—and it’s worked well. It’s a handy tool to have around.

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Apple hasn’t shipped operating systems on physical media in a full decade, but there are still good reasons to want a reliable old USB stick for macOS Catalina. Luckily, it's not hard to make one—either with a handy graphical user interface or some light Terminal use. Here's what you need to get started:

• A Mac that you have administrator access to. We've created a USB stick from both Mojave and Catalina, but your experience with other versions may vary.
• A 16GB or larger USB flash drive or a 16GB or larger partition on some other kind of external drive. A USB 3.0 drive will make things significantly faster, but an older USB 2.0 drive will work in a pinch; 8GB drives worked for Mojave and older versions of macOS, but the Catalina installer is just a little too large to fit.
• The macOS 10.15 Catalina installer from the Mac App Store (in High Sierra or older macOS versions) or the Software Update preference pane in Mojave. The installer will delete itself when you install the operating system, but it can be re-downloaded if necessary.
• If you want a GUI, take a look at Ben Slaney's Install Disk Creator from MacDaddy. There are other apps out there that do this, but this one is quick and simple.

If you want to use this USB installer with newer Macs as they are released, you'll want to periodically re-download new Catalina installers and make new install drives. Apple rolls support for newer hardware into new macOS point releases as they come out, so this will help keep your install drive as universal and versatile as possible.

Recovery Partition Creator Catalina Free

There's also one new consideration for newer Macs with Apple's T2 controller chip—as of this writing, that list includes the iMac Pro, the 2018 Mac Mini, the 2018 MacBook Air, and 2018 and 2019 MacBook Pros, though Apple keeps an updated list here. Among this chip's many security features is one that disallows booting from external drives by default. To re-enable this feature, hold down Command-R while your Mac reboots to go into Recovery Mode and use the Startup Security Utility to 'allow booting from external media.' If you're trying to install an older version of macOS, you may also need to go from Full Security to Medium Security to enable booting, but if you're just trying to install the current version of macOS, the Full Security option should be just fine. And if you're just doing an upgrade install rather than a clean install, you can run the Catalina installer from the USB drive from within your current installation of macOS, no advanced tweaking required.

Recovery Partition Creator Catalina Mac

The easy way

How To Create Recovery Partition Mac Catalina

Once you've obtained all of the necessary materials, connect the USB drive to your Mac and launch the Install Disk Creator. This app is basically just a GUI wrapper for the terminal command, so it should be possible to make install disks for versions of macOS going all the way back to Lion. In any case, it will work just fine for our purposes.

Install Disk Creator will automatically detect macOS installers on your drive and suggest one for you, displaying its icon along with its path. You can navigate to a different installer if you want, and you can also pick from all the storage devices and volumes currently connected to your Mac through the drop-down menu at the top of the window. Once you're ready to go, click 'Create Installer' and wait. A progress bar across the bottom of the app will tell you how far you have to go, and a pop-up notification will let you know when the process is done. This should only take a few minutes on a USB 3.0 flash drive in a modern Mac, though using USB 2.0 will slow things down.

The only slightly less-easy way

The Install Disk Creator is just a wrapper for the terminal command to create macOS install disks, so if you’re comfortable formatting your USB drive yourself and opening a Terminal window, it’s almost as easy to do it this way. Assuming that you have the macOS Catalina installer in your Applications folder and you have a Mac OS Extended (Journaled)-formatted USB drive (which is to say, HFS+ and notAPFS) named 'Untitled' mounted on the system, you can create a Catalina install drive using the following command.

sudo /Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Untitled

The command will erase the disk and copy the install files over. Give it some time, and your volume will soon be loaded up with not just the macOS installer but also an external recovery partition that may come in handy if your hard drive dies and you're away from an Internet connection. If you would like to create an install drive for a macOS version other than Catalina, just tweak the paths above to refer to Mojave or High Sierra instead.

Whichever method you use, you should be able to boot from your new USB drive either by changing the default Startup Disk in System Preferences or by holding down the Option key at boot and selecting the drive. Once booted, you'll be able to install or upgrade Catalina as you normally would. You can also use Safari, Disk Utility, or Time Machine from the recovery partition to restore backups or troubleshoot.