MacOS – How to move boot and recovery partition from HDD to SSD

disk-utilitymacospartitionrecovery

Today an Apple Certified Macintosh Technician has installed an SSD into my iMac medio 2011. The iMac was born with an 1TB HDD but now a Crucial M4 SSD is also installed inside the mac. I've moved my OS X to the SSD using the OS X Recovery, where the OS was installed using an Time Capsule Backup. Afterwards I did an Erase of the old HDD in Disk Utility to get the old OS removed and my data has now been transferred to new, clean partition. The name of the partition on the SSD is Crucial M4 SSD and the name of partition on my old 1TB HDD is Storage.

Please see this output from diskutil list:

iMac:~ dennis$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *256.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Crucial M4 SSD          255.7 GB   disk0s2
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk1
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk1s1
   2:          Apple_CoreStorage                         999.9 GB   disk1s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Boot OS X               134.2 MB   disk1s3
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                  Apple_HFS Storage                *999.7 GB   disk2

First of all, it seems that the OS X Recovery was not installed on the SSD. Right? How can I recreate this? Then I'm wondering why the Apple_Boot is located on the old disk1. Shouldn't that be on the SSD as well? What is the difference between disk1 and disk2? Please tell me, if anything else is looking strange.

EDIT1:

After I run the reinstaller, I get this output:

iMac:~ dennis$ diskutil list/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *256.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Crucial M4 SSD          255.2 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk1
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk1s1
   2:          Apple_CoreStorage                         999.9 GB   disk1s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Boot OS X               134.2 MB   disk1s3
/dev/disk3
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                  Apple_HFS Storage                *999.7 GB   disk3

What is the EFI and Apple_Boot on /dev/disk1?

Best Answer

You are correct that the recovery partition is not on your machine.

On my Lion machine I see:

$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            499.1 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3

You could clone your existing drive "Crucial M4 SSD" to an external disk, then repartition and reinstall Lion, then clone it back, though reinstalling Lion over your existing volume may also work! You could also try downloading the Recovery Update and see if that can add it:

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1464

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