MacOS – copy a recovery partition from an HD to an SSD

macosrecovery

I installed an SSD in the optical bay of my mid-2009 MacBook Pro. I formatted it and copied most of the files from my HD and it works fine but wound up having no Recovery partition. I followed the instructions at How can I create or recreate a Lion recovery partition? but at the end of the process I get this error:

Error (async): File system check on boot helper partition failed (-69840)

diskutil list shows me this:

/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *240.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS SteveBook2 SSD          239.2 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot                         650.0 MB   disk0s3
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *750.2 GB   disk1
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk1s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS SteveBook2 HD           749.3 GB   disk1s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk1s3

So it looks like the SSD has a partition, but the Recovery HD is not installed. Is there any way to copy the Recovery partition from the HD to the SSD? I tried using Carbon Copy Cloner but got this:

Carbon Copy Cloner screenshot

I'm really hoping to be able to activate Find My Mac.

Best Answer

Ok, I figured it out.

  1. What are the purposes and safety to enable the hidden debug menu in Disk Utility?

  2. Mount both recovery partitions

  3. Select the HD's recovery partition and use Disk Utility's Restore function to copy it to the SSD's recovery partition

  4. Boot from a USB drive and use the gpt remove/add commands as described at Dmitry Dulepov's blog to change the recovery partition's type from Apple_HFS to Apple_Boot. (Since the partition already existed at the correct size on my SSD I was able to skip the Create a new partition and Fix recovery partition size steps.)

   /dev/disk0
       #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
       0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *240.1 GB   disk0
       1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
       2:                  Apple_HFS SteveBook2 SSD          239.2 GB   disk0s2
       3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD (SSD)       650.0 MB   disk0s3
    /dev/disk1
       #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
       0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *750.2 GB   disk1
       1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk1s1
       2:                  Apple_HFS SteveBook2 HD           749.3 GB   disk1s2
       3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD (HD)        650.0 MB   disk1s3

Find My Mac is now enabled on my MacBook Pro.

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