MacOS Recovery disk utility is way older than disk utility on the drive

disk-utilityhard drivemacmacosrecovery

I am trying to reinstall my macOS. I'm currently on version 10.15.5 (Catalina) and my disk is formatted as APFS. However, when restart the computer and hold command+R to go to recovery mode I get the version of the OS that is way older (Mavericks). When I go to disk utility I see that the version is from 2012, and my disk isn't even visible (probably because that version of disk utility doesn't recognize APFS). When I click to reinstall OS I see that the version that will be installed in indeed Maverick, and the installer also doesn't see my disk.

Is there any way to update it to the newest version? When I start up my OS and open disk utility it is a newer version and it sees my disk successfully. Or is there any other way to reinstall macOS?

Best Answer

Reinstalling is pretty easy these days:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204904

If the old recovery functions, I wouldn’t worry about it. If you can boot to internet recovery, that also means you don’t need it.

Make a backup - you may need to erase everything to fix this, so be ready now.
Boot to any recovery OS and reinstall your OS - this doesn’t delete anything but does overwrite the system and make a new OS install and migrate all your apps, data, settings to the new install.

If you decide you need this to be updated / perfectly clean, follow the erase install guide. You will need your backup since this deletes everything from your Mac:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208496

Related Solutions

Disk Utility Error in Single User Mode vs Recovery Mode

Here's a beginner's guide to the command line. The single user mode is also like looking in as root - the first user that owns all of the computer historically from a unix perspective.

the $ indicates a prompt where you, the human user can type commands. The system is telling you how to prepare the drive for running the repair command.

Type the following text - the same as the first line you are told to from the screen:

/usr/sbin/fsck -fy

Note, that every space, every punctuation is exact and changing any one item may run an entirely different command. If the fsck command has any errors, you can and should run it again with the same command up to three times in a row or more in some rare cases.

To get out of that screen, you could halt the Mac or type exit to resume the normal start up process.

Apple documents the root user and fsck in these two articles if you are curious or wish to learn more:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204012 - About the root user
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201639 - Using Disk Utility and fsck
https://support.apple.com/kb/PH21893 - Single user mode in El Capitan

Disk utility killed the external drive

Running Diskutil in command line mode is pretty much the same as running it in the GUI and that is the right way to go: select the disk and click on repair. Or do it the way "perhapsmaybeharry" indicated. Either should work.

If that fails you may need to try a dedicated disk repair program (I use Diskwarrior but there are others that work well too).

Likely a bad sector cropped up at the wrong place at the wrong time that the drive firmware could not fix. It is unlikely that Disk Utility did anything. And another disk repair utility may be able to fix this.

If it can't you may have to send it off to a data recovery company, but that is expensive and DiskWarrior (or others) is likely to fix it.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Disk Utility Error in Single User Mode vs Recovery Mode

Disk utility killed the external drive

Related Question