The Recovery partition is a critical tool to help with macOS installation and fixing problems.
Starting a decade ago, Apple built the Recovery partition into macOS installations. It’s an operating system in itself—Apple started calling it recoveryOS earlier in 2021. If something goes awry with macOS on your startup volume, you can boot into Recovery and run Disk Utility, reinstall macOS, and execute low-level utilities.
But you have to have the Recovery partition installed in order to use it! It’s automatically put in place when you perform a macOS installation and updated to the latest version during macOS upgrades. But, in certain cases, the partition could be corrupted, overwritten, or deleted, or not copied in the case of cloning or restoring.
Check for the Recovery partition
You can find out whether the Recovery partition is installed in several ways:
- From the Terminal: The easiest method is while logged into macOS. At the Terminal command line (Applications > Utilities > Terminal), enter
diskutil listand press Return to see a list of all partitions on all drives. You’ll see Recovery listed as a separate line item within the list of all partitions for each disk that contains it. If you don’t see a partition with that name in a disk’s listing, there’s none installed.
Read more at MacWorld.com