MacOS – How to enable Find My Mac in a Macbook Pro (Mid 2009) running OS X 10.7.2

find-my-macmacosrecovery

After updating my system to Mac OS X 10.7.2 I was able to activate all features of iCloud, except for Find My Mac that stays greyed. It says "Recovery partition required".

I have a Macbook Pro, Middle 2009 model, and it was updated from Leopard to Snow Leopard to Lion.

Searching Apple's support website I could find articles on how to create the Recovery HD in an external drive, but I can't find how to create the partition in the internal drive. I have enough free space to repartition, and I have already created a 1 GB partition at the end of the free space (Apple recommends 1GB when creating the partition in an external drive).

I understand the Recovery HD is necessary for Filevault 2 too, so there must be a way of creating it after installation, but I can't find how. Anyone knows how to do that?

Best Answer

Here's a way to manually create the Recovery HD partition, but it seems complicated for a novice user.

If you don't feel sure about your self into doing this, then I suggest you to re-install Lion.

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MacOS – USB Lion Recovery Disk fails to boot

I have done this using the raw InstallESD.dmg image from the Mac App Store Lion installer (NOT the Recovery Disk Assistant) using the following steps:

Drag the InstallESD.dmg image to Disk Utility so that it appears on the side bar
Select your USB drive and partition the drive in to 2 or more GUID partitions
Once partitioning is complete, select the Restore tab
Drag that InstallESD.dmg image from the side bar to the source field
Drag the first partition from the USB drive on the side bar to the target field
Begin the restore process

Once finished you can leave things as they are or re-format the other partition as ExFAT or MS-DOS. However you should be aware the USB drive is GUID partitioned so only Windows 7 is likely to read it properly (I've never tried a GUID partioned USB drive on an XP system). You cannot use standard MBR partitions for the Lion Recovery Partition.

macOS Disk Utility – Resize Lion Partition to Fill Unused Space

My suggestion

Don't try to resize from the Recovery partition. Boot into the normal partition and resize from there.

Background

diskutil list is misleading you. It is not the position of the recovery partition which is your problem.

I had a very similar setup, and here is the output of diskutil list for me:

  #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            423.6 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
   4:                  Apple_HFS Temp Partition Test ... 74.8 GB    disk0s4
   5:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             792.2 MB   disk0s5

Partitions 4 and 5 had a dev version of Lion on them. I have just used Disk utility to delete partitions 4 and 5 and resize partition 2 to fill the space.

This worked - Disk Utility resized the main drive with no problem. So what have I done which is different to you? Well, I resized the main partition from booting into the main partition not the Recovery Partiion. You can resize a partition that you have booted from in Disk Utility.

It makes sense that the recovery partition would "get in the way" if you have booted from it, so I suspect that above suggestion might work for you.

Best Answer

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MacOS – USB Lion Recovery Disk fails to boot

macOS Disk Utility – Resize Lion Partition to Fill Unused Space

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