Replacing Mac HD means losing Recovery HD?
 

Hi-

My 2006 Mac Pro (Lion 10.7.5) has been having a few minor issues of late, and I've decided it's time to give it a new Mac HD boot drive. I used SuperDuper to back up my boot drive to my second drive (Mac HD Backup) some time back and ordered a new drive, which has been sitting on my desk for a few weeks now waiting for me to install it.

In the meantime, I've been booting from Mac HD Backup, so some of my docs and applications have been updated on the Mac HD Backup drive, but not on the "old" Mac HD.

I thought replacing the "old" Mac HD with a new HD would be be straightforward: first clone Mac HD Backup to the "old" Mac HD (as a precaution), then remove "old" Mac HD, replace with the new drive, name it Mac HD and again clone it off my (Mac HD Backup) boot drive. Then reboot from "new" Mac HD and business as usual.

However, when I went to start this process today, I discovered that SuperDuper had not copied the Recovery HD volume from my Mac HD to my Mac HD Backup. So I guess if I now install a new Mac HD and clone it from my Mac HD Backup, the Recovery HD will be lost for ever.

I know from Apple Support (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718) that I can download a new copy of Lion from the App Store and install it on an SDHC card, as an alternative to the Recovery HD partition on my Mac HD. Is this the best way forward? I've read in another thread here that SuperDuper will not clone the Recovery partition, but a bit of me would prefer to have the Recovery HD on an internal partition, where it "belongs"

Any comments or suggestions welcome

Thanks in advance

Jim

Simply reinstall the OS from the App Store, Jim. Or, you can create a recovery disk on a thumbdrive (which means it'll be intact even if your drive is unbootable - a nice thing).

To be clear, David - are you saying reinstall the OS from the App Store on my new drive after I've cloned old drive to new drive? And will this set up a Recovery HD volume on the new drive?

Jim

Yep, at your leisure. You don't have to do it immediately, of course.

Snag being, of course, that SD will not back up the Recovery partition. So I'll still need the OS copy on an SDHC card, thumb drive or usb stick, in case the boot drive fails at some point....

Maybe, though, if I keep a bootable drive fully backed-up, I'll only ever need the Recovery stuff if both drives fail simultaneously - altogether not such a big deal if I just run regular SuperDuper backups. (In the event the whole thing dies, I've got Backblaze anyway)

So maybe I'm exaggerating the usefulness of the Recovery HD???

Jim

Actually, no - you really don't. Because the recovery partition isn't required - these systems *also* have "Network Recovery", which can download and install without a recovery volume.

Sorry David - which systems?

Jim

Systems that support Mountain Lion and Lion.

So does that include my old (2006) Mac Pro, that came with Tiger (I think)? I've read about what you describe, but I thought it only applied to machines sold with Lion or ML loaded at new

Jim

I honestly don't know if there was an EFI update that supports Network Recovery: you might want to ask Apple.