How to restore a missing Recovery HD partition

Question

I bought a second hand Macbook Pro which came with OSX Lion installed, when I wanted to clean it I found out that it had no Recovery HD partition. I confirmed this through the Disk Utility (enabled debug menu, showing every partition).

I am able to boot using Apple's Internet Recovery feature, but since Lion wasn't bought on my Apple ID, its only giving me the option to buy OSX Mountain Lion. Can I use that to completely reinstall my Macbook and create a proper Recovery HD partition, and then can I simply use Timemachine afterwards to recover my data?

Any hints or tips for this process would be highly appreciated.

Answer 1

Yes, you can. Be sure to have a full Time Machine archive on an external device before you begin, and check your MBP meets the minimum system requirements before you buy. The Mountain Lion installer will create Recovery HD, if it doesn't already exist.

In case you choose to do a clean install, which is quicker, import your account afterwards from the Time Machine archive using Migration Assistant: you can pick and choose exactly what you want to import from the archive, and the Apple utility will sanitise imported user preferences so they are Mountain Lion compatible.

Alternatively, if you are comfortable using Terminal, Lloeki's answer to How can I create or recreate a Lion recovery partition has much to recommend it.

Answer 2

You can use Carbon Copy Cloner to create the space for the Recovery Partition if you are booted from another hard drive.

The problem is that you will need a copy of to 10.7 Recovery Partition to copy into the space that Carbon Copy Cloner creates.