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I accidentally removed the "Recovery HD" partition, when I was installing Windows, and now my OS X system is not booting anymore.

How do I fix this, without wiping the entire disk, and starting from scratch?

I started out with Boot Camp, and when I was partitioning the disk during the installation of Windows, I didn't knew which partition I needed to choose, so I booted back into OS X. When I got back in the installer of Windows (with a different resolution), I wasn't able to reformat the partitions, as was instructed in the Boot Camp manual, so removed the last two partitions (I though Boot Camp created two partitions for Windows; one for booting, one for the OS). But still, I was unable to install Windows. When I rebooted the system, OSX was not booting anymore. Trying to get into the OS X recovery mode, it revealed that the recovery partition was gone, because it started Internet Recovery.

It seems that the recovery partition is required for OS X to boot. Is that the case? And if so, how can I get it back, without doing a reinstall (or something like Missing Yosemite Recovery Partition). If not, how can I get the system booting again?

Specs (maybe useful)

  • MacBook Pro 15" (late 2013)
  • FileVault enabled
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  • The Recovery partition is needed to decrypt the OS X partition when FileVault 2 is enabled. Do you have a backup? You may not have to do a full restore if you do.
    – William T Froggard
    May 26, 2015 at 20:50
  • did you try the cmd+r (Internet recovery)
    – Ruskes
    May 26, 2015 at 21:07
  • The only issue is that Internet Recovery is often woefully out of date, especially if your computer is a few years old. That's why I'm asking if he has a backup. These days, the backup drive comes with an up to date recovery mode, which does the same thing, but shouldn't be out of date.
    – William T Froggard
    May 26, 2015 at 21:41
  • @Froggard No, I don't.I managed to get all my files out, using the internet recovery (@Buscar웃SD so yes, I already tried that). But it should be possible to fix this somehow by recovering the partition.
    – Ties
    May 27, 2015 at 11:15
  • How about using a recovery partition from an other mac or usb stick ? The target mode might also come handy if you intend to play with hdiutil or dd...
    – Florian Bidabé
    May 29, 2015 at 3:47

1 Answer 1

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Eventually, I fixed it by following a guide I found online (cannot find it anymore). I took a live cd with [TestDisk](http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk), and ran that. It found the deleted partition, and I recreated it withgdisk`. That worked like a charm ;)

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