El Capitan Recovery Update

[valdikor]

In the summer El Capitan beta testers were seeded the El Capitan Recovery update. See here:
https://www.macrumors.com/2015/08/21/apple-seeds-osx-el-capitan-recovery-update/
I signed up for the beta program when the GM Candidate hit and never received such an update and it's not available for the public release either. Am I doing something wrong, or were these changes to the recovery partition intended for the early beta testers only?

 

[comics addict]

Did you upgrade to the public build? If so I wouldn't worry about it since that update was a while back while the operating system was in the beta phase.

 

[valdikor]

Did you upgrade to the public build? If so I wouldn't worry about it since that update was a while back while the operating system was in the beta phase.

Yes, I downloaded and upgraded to the public build right when it came out yesterday.
OK thank you, so I guess the recovery partition was only for some of the earlier betas. I was just afraid I missed something and now I'm running outdated firmware components or something like that.

 

[comics addict]

Me too since I upgraded to the public release from the GM candidate release a couple of weeks back.

 

[valdikor]

For what it's worth, I now booted into the recovery partition and it had apparently been updated, it has the new Disk Utility and everything, so I guess the recovery update was part of the whole system update.

 

[tywebb13]

The recovery update was for betas and is no longer needed.

Installing from a full installer will update the recovery partition.

But once you start using delta or combo updates the recovery partition does NOT get updated.

There is a trick though to update it even after having updated the system via a delta or combo.

1. Download the Lion Recovery Update from https://support.apple.com/kb/dl1464?locale=en_US . (And before you ask, YES. I mean LION recovery update!) Make sure it is in your downloads folder. If you still happen to have the el capitan installer somewhere, right click on the Install OS X El Capitan.app file and click Show Package Contents. Go to Contents/SharedSupport/. Copy the InstallESD.dmg file into your Downloads folder. If you don't still have the full el capitan installer, you can get it again by redownloading from your purchases tab in your mac app store.

2. Download and decompress the file recovery.sh.zip from http://4unitmaths.com/recovery.sh.zip and move recovery.sh into your Downloads folder if it's not there already.

3. Open Terminal and type the following commands:

chmod +x ~/Downloads/recovery.sh
sudo ~/Downloads/recovery.sh

4. Wait a few minutes for it to finish and return back to a prompt. Reboot with holding down the option key to test your updated recovery partition.

So I'll start to do this when 10.11.1, 10.11.2 etc. are released. Note this only applies to public releases because betas for these don't exist as full installers, just deltas and combos. (No combo till 10.11.2 though.)

 

[valdikor]

The recovery update was for betas and is no longer needed.

Installing from a full installer will update the recovery partition.

But once you start using delta or combo updates the recovery partition does NOT get updated.

There is a trick though to update it even after having updated the system via a delta or combo.

1. Download the Lion Recovery Update from https://support.apple.com/kb/dl1464?locale=en_US . (And before you ask, YES. I mean LION recovery update!) Make sure it is in your downloads folder. If you still happen to have the el capitan installer somewhere, right click on the Install OS X El Capitan.app file and click Show Package Contents. Go to Contents/SharedSupport/. Copy the InstallESD.dmg file into your Downloads folder. If you don't still have the full el capitan installer, you can get it again by redownloading from your purchases tab in your mac app store.

2. Download and decompress the file recovery.sh.zip from http://4unitmaths.com/recovery.sh.zip and move recovery.sh into your Downloads folder if it's not there already.

3. Open Terminal and type the following commands:

chmod +x ~/Downloads/recovery.sh
sudo ~/Downloads/recovery.sh

4. Wait a few minutes for it to finish and return back to a prompt. Reboot with holding down the option key to test your updated recovery partition.

So I'll start to do this when 10.11.1, 10.11.2 etc. are released. Note this only applies to public releases because betas for these don't exist as full installers, just deltas and combos. (No combo till 10.11.2 though.)

Wow, thanks for the tutorial. So, if I understand you correctly, the recovery partition only gets updated once a year with the major OS X update and if you want to keep it up to date with the latest OS X version, you need to do it manually like this, right?

Why would one need to have the recovery partition always totally up to date? Is it really worth the hassle?
The question is not merely rhetorical, I'm really curious if there's any benefit to it.

 

[tywebb13]

Well there is another way. But I don't like it.

The other way is to just run the full installer for 10.11.1 or 10.11.2 etc even if you have already updated it via a delta or combo.

The reason I don't like it is because I reverted my system to get rid of core storage. And these full installers convert to core storage again - requiring a revert again.

My method however does not convert to core storage and thus avoids this problem.

 

[ShiggyMiyamoto]

The recovery update was for betas and is no longer needed.

Installing from a full installer will update the recovery partition.

But once you start using delta or combo updates the recovery partition does NOT get updated.

There is a trick though to update it even after having updated the system via a delta or combo.

1. Download the Lion Recovery Update from https://support.apple.com/kb/dl1464?locale=en_US . (And before you ask, YES. I mean LION recovery update!) Make sure it is in your downloads folder. If you still happen to have the el capitan installer somewhere, right click on the Install OS X El Capitan.app file and click Show Package Contents. Go to Contents/SharedSupport/. Copy the InstallESD.dmg file into your Downloads folder. If you don't still have the full el capitan installer, you can get it again by redownloading from your purchases tab in your mac app store.

2. Download and decompress the file recovery.sh.zip from http://4unitmaths.com/recovery.sh.zip and move recovery.sh into your Downloads folder if it's not there already.

3. Open Terminal and type the following commands:

chmod +x ~/Downloads/recovery.sh
sudo ~/Downloads/recovery.sh

4. Wait a few minutes for it to finish and return back to a prompt. Reboot with holding down the option key to test your updated recovery partition.

So I'll start to do this when 10.11.1, 10.11.2 etc. are released. Note this only applies to public releases because betas for these don't exist as full installers, just deltas and combos. (No combo till 10.11.2 though.)

Thanks for this! I'm on a Hackintosh running El Cap and for some reason I had two Recovery HDs. I was able to remove them both and remerge to only my EFI System Partition (ESP) and System partition, but I did want one Recovery partition. This worked a charm. I'm copying files across my network to my HTPC (also a Hackintosh, though running Mavericks) so I can't quite check if it'll boot into the new partition properly, but once the task(s) are done I will test it out. Thanks again!