Recovery Partition Hiding / Unhiding, Mount/ Unmount

[khurram]

The reason for hiding the recovery partition is to make it unavailable for all end-users. If the administrators need it they can unhide/ unmount it after logging into Macintosh HD. But if the administrators need it at the boot up then is there anyway to make it available at the boot up or firstly they must reverse the command of hiding the boot partition.

[#2]

.

[RobertHammen]

Command-R at power on to start from it. Can still be hidden but still use it, doesn't matter...

[khurram]

Command-R takes it to Internet Recovery and we found that the installer there is Lion (I think these Macs are from that time) also the current OSX on all Macs is Mavericks now and Recovery partition too. If Command-R only takes it to Internet Recovery than its not going to work for us.

[RobertHammen]

Command-Option-R takes you to Internet Recovery. Are you sure you have recovery partitions on these machines?

I think I've seen this behavior when the Recovery Partition exists, but is the wrong type...

Open Terminal, type:
diskutil list

Is your Recovery HD listed as Apple_Boot or Apple_HFS?

/dev/disk0 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: GUID_partition_scheme *500.3 GB disk0 1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1 2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 499.4 GB disk0s2 3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3

[khurram]

C02H65KDDJYC:~ admin$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: GUID_partition_scheme *60.7 GB disk0 1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1 2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 59.5 GB disk0s2 3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 814.7 MB disk0s3

This is the output, i have got only one drive in the macbook.

[khurram]

We have talked to Apple Support about the problem they think its OSX installation, however, they couldn't answer that how come Recovery HD is available at start up by using Option key but not available using Command-R key. If Recovery partition is not a bootable partition then it should turn up at start up using Option key either. Please note that we are testing it while Recovery Partition is not hidden.

[RobertHammen]

Did you image these machines or did they come from the factory like this? As a test, I'd do Internet Recovery on one of them, and then apply the upgrade from Lion to Mavericks. Now see if you have Recovery by Command-R. I'll bet it's an imaging issue with how the OS/recovery partition were installed on your machines.