Lost my Mojave Recovery Partition -- How to get it back?

[gadgetfreak98]

Hi. I am on a 2018 Mac Mini. I had decided to mess around with Catalina. I created a new volume on my internal SSD, installed a fresh install of Mojave and then an install of Catalina.

What I didn't realize was that Catalina seemed to take over the recovery partition on the hard drive, wiping out the Mojave variant.

I have had a few issues since installing the beta and decided to remove it. I deleted the 2xCatalina volumes (regular and data). But every time I could successfully log into the recovery partition, it was for Catalina.

Finally, yesterday, I wiped the internal SSD and used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone back to my internal SSD, thinking that would bring over the recovery partition from Mojave.

While the clone seemed to work for my regular startup needs (e.g., Mojave running as expected), I cannot get the recovery partition started. Either it hangs on the Apple logo, or tries, unsuccessfully, to go to Internet Recovery.

My setup is:

• Mac Mini 2018
• System and applications on internal SSD
• User drive on external SSD via Akitio TB3 enclosure
• Using an EGPU with the RX580 I had from another set up

From a backup/startup drive perspective, I have:

• A clone SSD in the Akitio enclosure
• A clone NVMe drive in a USB 3.1 Gen 2 enclosure
• A time machine backup on my Synology

For whatever reason, the two clones cannot reliably start up it seems... sometimes yes, more often now.

Thanks for any suggestions!

 

[haralds]

Try a Mojave re-install.

 

[gadgetfreak98]

I would but I cannot start from the recovery partition nor from my clones.

 

[TimothyR734]

If you can get in macOS Mojave try running this from the terminal

 

[gadgetfreak98]

can you give a little more color on what this is? A little worried about blindly running something off the web... No disrepsect meant!

 

[TimothyR734]

its not off the web its a script from the macOS Mojave for unsupported Mac made by jackluke its a terminal script and has done no harm on my iMac or MacBook it will either give you back access to recovery or not

 

[danallen]

can you give a little more color on what this is? A little worried about blindly running something off the web... No disrepsect meant!

Good thinking on not running blind. I recently ran a command without knowing what was supposed to happen, ended up wrecking Bluetooth sound and could figure out the fix. Cut my losses by starting with a new Catalina Beta install, now redoing a few days worth of configuration I had been whittling to get all my stuff going on Catalina. It seems like such an obvious caution, I blew off the advice I got a few years ago not to run something, especially from the command line, without knowing enough about the command.
Just saying, right on to make sure you exercise caution just as you have shown here.