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I am looking to swap my HDD for SSD and OWC recommended methods 2 listed in this link

  1. Perform your drive upgrade.
  2. Place your original drive in an external enclosure.
  3. Boot to the recovery partition on your original drive by holding down Command-R and starting up.
  4. Use Disk Utility to Restore to your new drive.
  5. Restart or Boot your Mac to the new drive.

So I was wondering if my MacBook has Lion recovery partition set up properly.

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3 Answers 3

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In the Terminal (located at /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app) type:

diskutil list

You know that you have a Recovery Partition installed if you see this entry:

Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB
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  • For those who have a newer version of OSX I was able to check if the recovery partition exists with the same command in El Capitan 10.11.6 and it worked.
    – Alex Ljamin
    Sep 6, 2016 at 2:01
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If you have FileVault 2 whole disk encryption turned on, you can not see the Recovery Partition by holding down the Option key at boot, instead you must hold down Command-R to boot from the Recovery Partition.

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Additionally you can turn on the Debug menu on Disk Utility that will allow you to see and mount all hidden partitions.

See View & Mount Hidden Partitions in Mac OS X

Show & Mount Hidden Partitions with Disk Utility in OS X

First you need to turn on the debug menu:

  • Quit out of Disk Utility, and launch Terminal to type the following defaults write command:
defaults write com.apple.DiskUtility DUDebugMenuEnabled 1
  • Relaunch Disk Utility and look for “Debug” to appear alongside ‘Help’ Click on the new Debug menu and pull down and select “Show every partition” so that a checkmark appears next to it
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