Cloned my startup drive to an SSD, now recovery mode won’t work

[David Roth weiss]

Try cloning to a different drive, perhaps it will build a new recovery partition? That’s the best idea I’ve got.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Roger Poole]

Nick, is your new SSD named exactly the same as your old disk. My thoughts are that the recovery partition is linked to Disk X and not Disk XX. So the recovery partition may be looking for Disk X. If you remember the exact name of your old disk, try changing the name of the SSD to the name of the previous disk where the recovery partition was created.

Good luck.

[Warren Eig]

Here’s a trick. Install the OS on the SSD from scratch. It will create the recovery partition. Now clone your original drive to the SSD. If you use SuperDuper! you can do a smart clone and it will only update the needed files to make a clone. Voila! you have the recovery partition.

Warren Eig
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[Shane Ross]

What did you use to Clone? Carbon Copy Cloner, newer ones at least, make sure the recovery partition is cloned as well. But I do think Warren has the best advice here…

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Roger Poole]

As Nick said, he’s erased the original disk. So only the new SSD to work with.

[Nick Meyers]

[Roger Poole] “try changing the name of the SSD to the name of the previous disk”

thanks Roger, i will try that first

[Shane Ross] “What did you use to Clone? Carbon Copy Cloner, newer ones at least, make sure the recovery partition is cloned as well.”

thanks, Shane, yes i did use CCC. maybe a skipped a step?

[Warren Eig] “Here’s a trick. Install the OS on the SSD from scratch. It will create the recovery partition. Now clone your original drive to the SSD. If you use SuperDuper! you can do a smart clone and it will only update the needed files to make a clone. Voila! you have the recovery partition.
“

that does make sense.
as i mentioned, i wiped the original drive, but i can clone back to it or another drive, and start from scratch on the SSD

thanks, folks
nick

[Nick Meyers]

turns out this is standard behaviour…

CCC doesn’t create a recovery drive when cloning,
it creates an ARCHIVE of it,
which has to be un-archived after the clone.

this is done from CCC again, but can’t be done from the cloned drive,
you need to boot from another drive.
so keeping my original until that’d been done would have been the thing to do.

i wound up starting my laptop (with the new SSD) as a dumb drive, and hooked it up to my iMac,
and CCC on that machine could do the job

so my laptop now has a nice new SSD drive WITH a recovery drive ☺

cheers,
nick

[Roger Poole]

Nick, thanks for posting the solution. Now we all know.