Lion Recovery Utilities menu is missing recovery options

[Diogones]

Hey all,

I have a 2009 Macbook Pro running ML, which was upgraded from Lion. The installation went without a hitch, and there haven't been any problems so far. However, I have noticed one discrepancy.

When I booted up into ML Recovery HD, and select the Utilities from the menu bar, I only see three options: Network Utility, Terminal, and Firmware Password Utility:

However, after checking reading Anandtech's review of Lion, I noticed that their Utilities menu featured three additional items: Disk Utility, System Information, and Restore System from Backup:

How is this discrepancy explained? Is it because I did an in-place upgrade from Lion? Or is it because this full version of the Recovery HD is part of a different system build, say, a factory installed version of ML? Or is it simply only available after booting up directly from the Installer.app, and there is no way to get this extended menu on a USB Recovery HD?

Any clarification would be most helpful, as I've searched everywhere, and I haven't found a single note on the 'net explaining this!

 

[Blackened Apple]

Hmm, you should have a "Restore system from backup" and Disk Utility entries in the big window that appears in the center, not the Utilities menu.

 

[Diogones]

Hey Blackened Apple,

Well I do have Restore from Backup and Disk Utility in the main window, the example screenshot simply doesn't show this. What I was wondering about was why Restore from Backup, Disk Utility, and System Information do not appear in the Utilities submenu.

 

[Fishrrman]

This is just slightly off-topic, but the best "recovery option" for Mountain Lion (or for ANY version of the Mac OS) is a fully-bootable clone of your main drive, along with some kind of "backup" of the OS install .dmg saved on the media of your choice (DVD, flashdrive, hard drive copy, etc.).

The Apple "recovery partition" paradigm offers very limited options insofar as dealing with a damaged OS or disk is concerned. Having a fully-bootable backup permits you to use not only Apple repair tools such as Disk Utility, but 3rd-party repair apps as well...

 

[Diogones]

A fine point, Fishrrman, and definitely something to keep in mind! You could even go so far as to argue that having a clone would solve your backup needs as well, assuming you kept the clone current. And even better, in the event of a hard drive crash, you could simply pop out the old drive and throw in the clone, and you'd be in business, as opposed to restoring the Time Machine backup to a separate, new drive. Still, TM does provide up to the minute backups, so relying on a clone solely for backups might not cover everything since the last clone. Personally, I've had great success with Carbon Copy Cloner, and I can see why the devs are going to a shareware model; it is great software, and it should be supported!

Now that was off-topic, but it did highlight an important point, hence why I added it to this thread. Now to get back to the primary post: hopefully someone else has an explanation for the Recovery HD Utilities menu items discrepancy.