Does the macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) installer install a Recovery Parition

high sierrarecovery

Just upgraded from 10.12.6 to 10.13.3. Everything seemed to go smoothly… except I see I have no Recovery Partition any more – holding down Option at startup just gets me my macOS and BootCamp boot options. Here is the results of mount:

~>mount
/dev/disk1s1 on / (apfs, local, journaled)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local, nobrowse)
/dev/disk1s4 on /private/var/vm (apfs, local, noexec, journaled, noatime, nobrowse)
/dev/disk0s3 on /Volumes/Bootcamp (ntfs, local, read-only, noowners)
map -hosts on /net (autofs, nosuid, automounted, nobrowse)
map auto_home on /home (autofs, automounted, nobrowse)

So is no Recovery Partition expected with 10.13?

Best Answer

With macOS 10.13 (High Sierra), the recovery partition is moved to inside an APFS container. This container houses your main OS partition (what used to be HFS+ in macOS 10.12 (Sierra) and older) and the recovery partition, as well as a swap partition called VM (Virtual Memory) and a Preboot partition. You can see these by running the command diskutil list:

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                 Apple_APFS Container disk1         499.9 GB

/dev/disk1 (synthesized):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      APFS Container Scheme -                      +499.0 GB   disk1
                                 Physical Store disk0s2
   1:                APFS Volume macOS                   496.0 GB   disk1s1
   2:                APFS Volume Preboot                 21.9 MB    disk1s2
   3:                APFS Volume Recovery                517.8 MB   disk1s3
   4:                APFS Volume VM                      1.1 GB     disk1s4

You can see it listed here as disk1s3. None of the partitions in the container are automounted other than disk1s1, though you still can mount them (taking the recovery partition as an example) by running diskutil mount disk1s3.

The recovery partition is still accessed the same way as before at startup (holding ⌘R at the startup chime).

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