Do I have a Recovery HD

disk-utilityfilevaulthard drivepartitionrecovery

I replaced my MBPs HDD with an SSD and put the HDD in the optical bay. Since then, I was missing the Recovery HD partition. That was still on Lion

Now I have upgraded to Yosemite, and running diskutil list gives this:

/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            490.8 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Boot OS X               134.2 MB   disk0s3
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *120.0 GB   disk1
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk1s1
   2:          Apple_CoreStorage                         119.2 GB   disk1s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk1s3
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                  Apple_HFS SSD                    *118.8 GB   disk2
                                 Logical Volume on disk1s2
                                 89637DB5-6258-4E8A-A43B-814E61E23A8E
                                 Unlocked Encrypted

There are a couple of strange things here. Firstly, the SSD which was formerly /dev/disk0 has now moved to the end. I recently encrypted it, I don't know if that has anything to do with it. Second, the same drive is also listed above as /dev/disk1, evident by the size of it (120GB Samsung EVO).
Third, there is a mysterious Apple_Boot Boot OS X partition on the HDD, I do not know what that is. But the point of this question is the presence of a Recovery HD partition on the HDD.

When I hold CMD-R at boot to start recovery, it puts me straight to internet recovery (unless I connect my backup disk), which probably means no recovery partition has been found. The Disk Utility GUI also does not show one (debug enabled)

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I was under the impression that the installer creates a new recovery hd if not present, does the one for Yosemite not do that? And if no, why does diskutil list this Recovery HD which seemingly cannot be used for recovery?

Best Answer

With the encryption process included in Yosemite there is a duplicate drive created in the space after the drive that was encrypted. If I'm entirely honest I don't know how that works or what its purpose is I just know that every encrypted machine in this situation has it. That being said you can see using diskutil that your ssd does have a recovery drive on it. Disk Utility no longer shows that in its list. So... not a lot of science to back it up but all signs point to a proper install having occurred and the recovery partition being right where it should be.

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