Making El Capitan Recovery HD selectable at boot - possible?

[Tangmu]

I installed El Capitan Dev Beta 1 on a freshly erased and partitioned MacBook Pro Retina. In contrast to Yosemite and previous versions of OS X I realized that the "Recovery HD" partition is no longer showing up during boot (by holding down the "alt / option" key). You can however still boot into it by holding down "cmd" + "r" during boot - just as before. This is true both when you have encrypted your drive with FileVault but also when FileVault is disabled - thus differing from previous OS X versions.

Now my question: Is there any way I can manually unhide a partition to show up for boot when holding down the "alt / option" key during boot?

A look at diskutil in Terminal shows the "Recovery HD" is of Type "Apple_Boot" as it should be so I'm wondering if there are some hidden parameters that prevent it from being displayed.

I'm especially asking since my goal is to create a dual boot system with Yosemite and El Capitan as well as their respective "Recovery HD" partitions.

Experts help would be highly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

 

[crjackson2134]

It sounds like your install resulted in a CoreStorage volume. Look around in the Yosemite thread and you'll find one that shows you exactly how to check for this and how to use the corestorage revert command in the CLI (terminal). This assumes you aren't using FileVault. If you are using FileVault, CoreStorage is required and there is no way to revert unless you turn off Filevault encryption.

If you don't find it let me know, and all hunt down the instructions for you. I've had to use it a couple of times with Yosemite.

Read through the following threads, and pay attention on how to use the diskutil cs list & diskutil cs revert commands.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/caution-yosemite-may-screw-up-partitions.1741742/page-2

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/is-this-normal-to-have.1740900/page-2

 

[Weaselboy]

What you are seeing is normal and happened with Yosemite also.

To undo the core storage like CR mentioned run the command below in Terminal. Make sure no other drives are attached when you do this.

diskutil cs revert /

 

[Tangmu]

Thank you very much guys! I will test it and report back.

 

[Tangmu]

Okay. I tried it and it worked! Thanks a lot guys!

I still have two questions:

1.) Are there any disadvantages by not using a CoreStorage type volume on a single SSD besides not being able to use FileVault?

2.) Do you know if every OS X installation will create its own "Recovery HD" partition or could it happen that when installing Yosemite on the partition I reserved for it would actually overwrite El Capitan's recovery partition?

Thanks again!

 

[!!!]

Okay. I tried it and it worked! Thanks a lot guys!

I still have two questions:

1.) Are there any disadvantages by not using a CoreStorage type volume on a single SSD besides not being able to use FileVault?

2.) Do you know if every OS X installation will create its own "Recovery HD" partition or could it happen that when installing Yosemite on the partition I reserved for it would actually overwrite El Capitan's recovery partition?

Thanks again!

2. The recovery HD goes right after the OS X partition, so no, there will be a separate Recovery HD for every OS X partition/install.

 

[Tangmu]

2. The recovery HD goes right after the OS X partition, so no, there will be a separate Recovery HD for every OS X partition/install.

Good to know! Thanks for clearing that up!

 

[Weaselboy]

Are there any disadvantages by not using a CoreStorage type volume on a single SSD besides not being able to use FileVault?

Nah... it won't hurt anything.

 

[Tangmu]

Nah... it won't hurt anything.

Awesome! Thanks for the quick reply Weaselboy!