How to Check for a Recovery HD in OS X Yosemite

How To Check If a Recovery HD Partition was Created in OS X Yosemite. Check If A Recovery HD is Missing After Installing OS X Yosemite.

TRANSCRIPT:

In this episode, How to Check for a Recovery HD in OS X Yosemite.

Soooooo, Let’s Get Started.

In previous versions of OS X Mountain Lion and Mavericks, holding down the Option key after pressing the power button, and letting go when the System Manager screen appears, as shown here, you were able to view the Recovery HD partition icon. Clicking on the Recovery icon brings you to the OS X Utilities screen shown here.

Alternatively; holding down the Command-R keys after turning on the Mac and letting go when you see the Apple logo, and within a few seconds, the OS X Utilities screen appears.

However; In OS X Yosemite, things have changed slightly, now when holding down the Option key after turning on the Mac as mentioned earlier,the Recovery HD icon is no longer visible.

Therefore; in order to access the OS X Utilities options, found on the Recovery HD partition, like before, hold down the Command-R keys after turning on the Mac as mentioned earlier.

However, if a Recovery HD partition was not created after installing OS X Yosemite and after pressing the Command-R keys, you will see the following screen shot, indicating that an Internet Recovery is Starting.

Basically an automatic connection is made to Apple servers, where the necessary OS X Utilities needed, gets downloaded to your hard drive and which could take a quite a while to complete.

Therefore; before pressing the Command-R keys after starting the Mac, it’s best to check that a Recovery HD partition was created after installing OS X Yosemite. To do so, simply launch Terminal and type the following one line command code:

diskutil list

As shown, a Recovery HD partition was created after the installation of Yosemite, as listed and shown here.

However; if a Recovery HD partition was not created, you’ll see the following screen shot.

If that’s the case, simply reinstall OS X Yosemite again. Upon reboot, re-issue the diskutil list command again in Terminal to verify that a Recovery HD partition has been created.

And that’s all there is to it.

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