MacOS – Can’t Boot My 10.14.3 Mac Pro Into Internal Recovery Mode

bootmacosrecovery

< 3.5 GHz, 6-Core Mac Pro (MacPro6,1) with 16GB RAM and D700 GPUs, running macOS 10.14.3 >

Greetings, folks!

I am baffled that I cannot boot my Mac into Recovery Mode after a clean install of 10.14.3. (I have poured through this site’s related pages!) I have plugged my keyboard directly into the Mac Pro, bypassing the hub, and tried multiple ways of holding down cmd-r during the boot process including prior to pressing the power button. I have no problem booting the Mac into Internet Recovery Mode (cmd-opt-r). Holding down the option key on boot does nothing; the Mac just boots normally. Holding down the shift key will bring up the login screen.

diskutil reports that the recovery volume exists and is valid. The calls returned below are:

diskutil list (with and without an external drive mounted)
diskutil verifyVolume disk1s3
diskutil cs list
sudo gpt -r show /dev/disk0

I had even downloaded and installed the recovery update, macOSUpd10.14.2.RecoveryHDUpdate.pkg, on multiple volumes, but still with no luck.

Any thoughts on why my Mac doesn’t respond to cmd-r?

Are there any shell scripts or AppleScripts that can be used to force the Mac to boot into the Recovery HD? (I can’t imagine . . . )

Blessings, and thank you!!

Richard Fairbanks

6-251-76-76:~ Me$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.3 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                 Apple_APFS Container disk1         500.1 GB   disk0s2

/dev/disk1 (synthesized):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      APFS Container Scheme -                      +500.1 GB   disk1
                                 Physical Store disk0s2
   1:                APFS Volume Cupid                   370.2 GB   disk1s1
   2:                APFS Volume Preboot                 45.9 MB    disk1s2
   3:                APFS Volume Recovery                517.0 MB   disk1s3
   4:                APFS Volume VM                      2.1 GB     disk1s4

/dev/disk2 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *4.0 TB     disk2
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk2s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Cupid Clone             500.0 GB   disk2s2
   3:                  Apple_HFS OS X 1                  40.0 GB    disk2s3
   4:                 Apple_APFS Container disk3         40.1 GB    disk2s4
   5:                  Apple_HFS Applications            100.0 GB   disk2s5
   6:                  Apple_HFS Me                      1000.0 GB  disk2s6
   7:                  Apple_HFS Miscellaneous           2.3 TB     disk2s7

/dev/disk3 (synthesized):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      APFS Container Scheme -                      +40.1 GB    disk3
                                 Physical Store disk2s4
   1:                APFS Volume macOS Mojave            25.3 GB    disk3s1
   2:                APFS Volume Preboot                 44.4 MB    disk3s2
   3:                APFS Volume Recovery                517.0 MB   disk3s3
   4:                APFS Volume VM                      8.6 GB     disk3s4

6-251-76-76:~ Me$ diskutil verifyVolume disk1s3
Started file system verification on disk1s3 Recovery
Verifying file system
Volume was successfully unmounted
Live mode required because other APFS Volumes in its Container are mounted
Using live mode
Performing fsck_apfs -n -l -x /dev/rdisk1s3
Checking the container superblock
Checking the EFI jumpstart record
Checking the space manager
Checking the space manager free queue trees
Checking the object map
Checking volume
Checking the APFS volume superblock
The volume Recovery was formatted by diskmanagementd (945.230.6) and last modified by apfs_kext (945.241.4)
Checking the object map
Checking the snapshot metadata tree
Checking the snapshot metadata
Checking the extent ref tree
Checking the fsroot tree
Verifying allocated space
Performing deferred repairs
The volume /dev/rdisk1s3 appears to be OK
File system check exit code is 0
Restoring the original state found as mounted
Finished file system verification on disk1s3 Recovery

taken from: How to boot into recovery mode without cmd-r?

6-251-76-76:~ Me$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.3 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                 Apple_APFS Container disk1         500.1 GB   disk0s2

/dev/disk1 (synthesized):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      APFS Container Scheme -                      +500.1 GB   disk1
                                 Physical Store disk0s2
   1:                APFS Volume Cupid                   362.6 GB   disk1s1
   2:                APFS Volume Preboot                 45.9 MB    disk1s2
   3:                APFS Volume Recovery                517.0 MB   disk1s3
   4:                APFS Volume VM                      2.1 GB     disk1s4

6-251-76-76:~ Me$ diskutil cs list
No CoreStorage logical volume groups found

6-251-76-76:~ Me$ sudo gpt -r show /dev/disk0
      start       size  index  contents
          0          1         PMBR
          1          1         Pri GPT header
          2         32         Pri GPT table
         34          6         
         40     409600      1  GPT part - C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B
     409640  976695384      2  GPT part - 7C3457EF-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
  977105024          3         
  977105027         32         Sec GPT table
  977105059          1         Sec GPT header

Best Answer

try this

sudo nvram “recovery-boot-mode=unused”

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diskutil corestorage delete [UUID of 50GB Logical Volume Group]

GUI Disk Utility correctly saw the 50 GB of empty space as part of the other Logical Volume Group and I was able to delete it and merge it back in fine.

MacOS – Uninstall rEFInd 0.8-3.7 on Yosemite

Note: El Capitan (OS X 10.11) prevents users from selecting rEFInd and common Linux distributions from the Startup Disk pane. The new preferred method is to install rEFInd into the an EFI partition. My answer, to an unrelated question, outlines this new preferred method to start the rEFInd Boot Manager and Linux operating systems. The answer, given below, applies to Yosemite (OS X 10.10) and possibly earlier versions of OS X.

Personally, I installed rEFInd on my computer to its own partition. This prevents the problems you are encountering. Everything ./install.sh installed went to this partition. If I want to remove rEFInd, I can simply erase or remove the partition. Of course both are unnecessary, because I can turn rEFInd on and off at will. I just go to the Startup window in System Preferences select my boot partition. This computer has OS X, Windows, Fedora and rEFInd installed.

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/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Marlin                  300.0 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
   4:       Microsoft Basic Data Coelacanth              98.9 GB    disk0s4
   5:                  Apple_HFS Linux HFS+ ESP          209.7 MB   disk0s5
   6: 0FC63DAF-8483-4772-8E79-3D69D8477DE4               524.3 MB   disk0s6
   7:                  Linux LVM                         98.6 GB    disk0s7
   8:                  Apple_HFS rEFInd                  939.5 MB   disk0s8

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Answer to your questions:

How do I uninstall rEFInd 0.8-3.7 using OS X 10.10.3? Read the ./install.sh file and undo whatever it did. I should of had you run the commands bless --info and bless --info --getBoot. These would have told where the .efi file was stored. Note: Almost everyone installs rEFInd to the OS X boot partition.

How would I go and reinstall it using different options if I cannot remove it? The author of the software never said rEFInd could not be removed. I suggested you just install it again to its own partition. This might be a good place to mention the gpt command has to be run while either booted to an external recover partition or while booted to internet recovery.

Could I simply remove the EFI partition or would that corrupt my Mac? Do not remove the EFI partition! It is not used to boot OS X, but it is used by OS X for other things.

Best Answer

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Answer to your questions:

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