MacOS – What are the utilities included in the Mavericks recovery partition

bootcampmacospartitionrecoverysnow leopard

What is Mavericks Recovery Partition good for? I have Maverick also installed on an external Hard drive, in case something goes wrong with my main system I can use this external hard. Do I still need the recovery partition? (I also have my old Snow Leopard installation disk).

Background:
I have a macbook pro, with Snow Leopard on it. I want to update to Mavericks. Before updating my main system, I put an old hard disk in my mac (same configuration as the main one, with Snow Leopard osx), and updated to Maverick to test the waters!

It went almost well, just it did not create recovery partition since I had 3 partitions on my hard (OSX, bootcamp and a fat32 partition for data).

now, for having the recovery partition, I need to format my hard, and do a fresh install of Snow Leopard, and bootcamp windows, and update to Maverick. Does it worth it? Or, I forget about the Recovery Partition, and update my current configuration to Mavericks, and in case of any emergency I use the Maverick installed on an Hard drive?

Thanks

Best Answer

The recovery partition for OS X 10.7 and above includes the following utility applications:

Firmware Password Utility
Network Utility
Disk Utility
Terminal

In addition, the recovery partition allows you to use a version of Safari to better help you research and diagnose problems, restore from a Time Machine backup, and install OS X.

Related Solutions

Repartition the primary hard drive without removing the Lion recovery partition

No destruction will happen - This repartitioning you propose is possible to safely do.

The recovery partition won't modify itself (since it's in use) and will survive attempts to erase itself when it's in charge.

You also can resize things in general when booted from the main OS as long as files that are stored in the area being trimmed are mobile and not in-use or locked.

You have to enable a debug mode for Disk Utility to see and work on the Recovery HD so it's planned to be something you have to know a trick and go out of your way to tamper with. (Note: Debug mode is removed in 10.11 with the redesigned Disk Utility app)

MacOS – How to resize the Lion partition to fill up the unused space on the drive

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.

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