10.12 Recovery Partition

[jthurwood]

One of our clients have upgraded to Sierra by re-imaging their machines using Casper Admin.
They have since noticed that the machines do not have a recovery partition. Is there a way of installing this manually?

Historically i have used a tool called "recovery partition installer" or "create recovery partition" but neither of these tools are working in 10.12.

Thanks

[SimonLovett]

We had a problem here with some portables on 10.10 and 10.9 which didn't historically have a recovery partition, which in turn meant they couldn't have filevault activated. Our solution was to run the 10.12 installer, which upgraded and fixed it.

If they are on 10.12.1 or 10.12.2, you might find the 10.12.3 installer fixes this?

[CapU]

I was using a tool called RecoveryPartition Installer. Which i was using on 10.10.5. I thought it wasn't working but was able to actually install it during imaging. I then used Casper Admin to split the partition before imaging and Create a Recovery partition. I was prompted to install a OS to the partition and I installed the Partition Recovery app. All good and I can send commands from Casper to Lock or wipe the machine in case of loss or theft.

[ericbenfer]

Re-running the latest 10.12.x "Install macOS Sierra" will re-create the recovery partition.
This worked for me in the real world three weeks ago.

Eric

[RobertHammen]

Create Recovery Partition Installer creates a pkg you can deploy to systems, and it will create a Recovery partition that works just fine.

[rtrouton]

I have a post on creating a recovery partition installer using Create Recovery Partition Installer, available via the link below:

https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2016/07/22/macadmin-101-building-a-recovery-partition-installer-pa...

[pmcgurn]

@rtrouton I presume you run this as part of imaging with the "run after reboot" option, right?

[johnklimeck]

Recovery Partition Installer looks to be broken with 10.12.3 / 10.12.4:

/private/var/folders/ls/ny_wgky942xcrw4bl7tpjgj00000gk/T/AppTranslocation/9CD21EBD-5A87-49A6-B4C7-E96DC1565A19/d/Create Recovery Partition Installer.app/Contents/Resources/script: line 39: ./cocoaDialog.app/Contents/MacOS/cocoaDialog: No such file or directory
Cancelled!

CocoaDialog never gets downloaded. So I got it, put in /Contents/Resources, and it does make a PKG, but the install fails?

thx,

john

[johnklimeck]

Recovery Partition Installer looks to be broken with 10.12.3 / 10.12.4:

/private/var/folders/ls/ny_wgky942xcrw4bl7tpjgj00000gk/T/AppTranslocation/9CD21EBD-5A87-49A6-B4C7-E96DC1565A19/d/Create Recovery Partition Installer.app/Contents/Resources/script: line 39: ./cocoaDialog.app/Contents/MacOS/cocoaDialog: No such file or directory
Cancelled!

CocoaDialog never gets downloaded. So I got it, put in /Contents/Resources, and it does make a PKG, but the install fails?

thx,

john

[michael_ferguso]

I'm getting the same with 10.12.3. It installs but I dont see it show up correctly

[cwaldrip]

I posted a bug on the project page for Recovery Partition Installer.

In the meantime I found this solution...

Basically you have to have the Sierra installer, you run the simple script in the post and it downloads the recovery update tool from Apple for the detest utility, and it builds a new recovery partition. You have to do this booted from another volume as well. That's easy for us since we have a hidden boot partition we can use. But for a lot of folks it'll mean an external drive or something similar.

[swapple]

So we can't push a script with Jamf that will install a missing recovery partition??

[AVmcclint]

This is what I've done to make sure imaged Macs get the Recovery partition with Sierra since it's not being properly captured by Composer.