MacOS Sierra won’t boot into Recovery HD even though its there, only OSX Lion Internet Recovery [mid-2012 Macbook Pro (non-Retina)]

filevaultinternet-recoverymacosrecovery-hd

I'm having a persistent issue and have tried all of the common fixes I have researched online (will list shortly). Symptoms: Command-R on boot only takes me to Internet Recovery, and a dated one at that (Lion I believe). Recovery HD still shows up on the main volume in terminal diskutil list (see below), but I can't get into it.

My setup, dual drive with SSD in main slot and HD in optibay:

Crucial M550 SSD 1TB with about ~720GB full ("Macbook Pro SSD") as main volume in the SATA HD slot. 80GB Win10 Bootcamp partition on the same drive.
Original Macbook HD installed in DVD slot. Not really relevant but this drive is partitioned into a second bootable Sierra partition and a "Media HD" drive for files. OS drive is not encrypted and the recovery partion works fine and is visible to select when booting and holding Opt key (but not Cmd-R). "Media HD" is encrypted.
Relevant: I first noticed the issue after I encrypted the SSD using Filevault (but it could have been before as I haven't booted into Recovery for a long time). The process completed successfully including optimization. After that I was able to wipe out an older Bootcamp partition, create a new one and installed Windows 10 successfully.

What I've tried so far:

Reinstalled Sierra maybe 3x in different ways, once from the Applications folder, once from the second internal volume using a bootable createinstallmedia Sierra install disc partition, and once using the recovery partition on the HD. I thought one of these options had worked a few times, but it turned out it was taking me to the Install disc recovery options. Once that disc was gone, I was back to internet recovery.
I tried http://musings.silvertooth.us/2016/10/recovery-partition-4-0-4/, including disabling SIP first using the terminal in recovery options from the install disk USB (I think the older Internet Recovery wouldn't work or didn't recognize the command). This exits with an error, something about "mainpartition" not defined. I can't recall exactly.
Lastly, I tried https://davidjb.com/blog/2016/12/creating-a-macos-recovery-partition-without-reinstalling-osx-or-re-running-your-installer/. I was able to successfully run through the entire process, but after this the problem had not changed and still goes directly to Internet Recovery upon boot with CMD-R

I have a feeling this may have something to do with the fact that I have filevault enabled already so any changes to Recovery HD are not working? I'm hoping to avoid having to decrypt, attempt fix, and encrypt again (it took a while for my encryption to complete with 720GB of data), but willing to try that if there are no other fixes. I'm also hoping to avoid a clean install. (I have external Time Machine backups but that disc is currently encrypting so I don't want to count on that until the encryption process is complete, 1.7TB so its taking a while. I also have other CCC backups that run regularly but that would involve setting up the whole system and apps from scratch if I can't depend on my Time Machine backup.)

Lastly, here is my diskutil list output:

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
#:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk0
1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
2:          Apple_CoreStorage Macbook Pro SSD         943.3 GB   disk0s2
3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
4:       Microsoft Basic Data Windows 10 SSD          80.0 GB    disk0s4

/dev/disk1 (internal, virtual):
#:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
0:                  Apple_HFS Macbook Pro SSD        +942.9 GB   disk1
                              Logical Volume on disk0s2
                              79B0DCD6-ED6C-495A-B592-77010B8F5D7E
                              Unlocked Encrypted

/dev/disk2 (internal, physical):
#:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk2
1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk2s1
2:                  Apple_HFS Macbook Pro HD          200.0 GB   disk2s2
3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk2s3
4:          Apple_CoreStorage Media HD                799.2 GB   disk2s4
5:                 Apple_Boot Boot OS X               134.2 MB   disk2s5

Best Answer

From the sounds of it, you've covered all the steps related to disk issues. My guess is that the startup-disk selection settings are not being saved or read correctly from the NVRAM.

Resetting NVRAM as outlined by Apple's article How to reset NVRAM on your Mac:

On Mac computers that play a startup sound, you can release the keys after the second startup sound.

On iMac Pro, you can release the keys after the Apple logo appears and disappears for the second time.

Once that's done, give Command+R one more go. Good luck.

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Thanks @Tetsujin. The listing looked a little screwy so I was a little hesitant to go mucking around with the command-line diskutil. But I ended up doing a

diskutil corestorage list

and then

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.

I also can select the boot partition under Windows by using BootCamp and by holding the Option key down at startup. The command diskutil list produces:

/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

Note, the rEFInd partition is ~ 1 GB in size. In fact, it can be as small as 100 MB. When I setup this computer, I used the Disk Utility application to create the rEFInd partition. If I would have used the gpt command, I could have created a smaller partition. Neither OS X, Windows, Fedora nor rEFInd use the EFI partition to boot the computer. In fact, there is nothing useful in the EFI partition.

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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