cannot access recovery

Hi,
I have a Mac-mini mid-2011 and I just purchased an external hard drive for it.

I'm trying to setup the external drive so I can boot both Lion and Mountain Lion.

The first step was to format the external drive using Disk Utility. That went fine. I created 2 partitions and formatted them HFS+ journaled.

Now what I want to do is to create an image backup of my existing Lion installation and copy it to the external drive. So simple, hold down Command-R while restarting and boot into the recovery utilities. Right?

Well, wrong! For whatever reason, this Mac-mini refuses to boot into recovery tools. I am using a Windows keyboard. So I tried the WindowsKey-r = nope. Tried the AltKey-r = nope. Tried the WindowsKey-AltKey-r = nope.

So how do I get booted into the utilities on this Mac-mini?

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GGJstudios said:

Clone your internal drive to the external using Carbon Copy Cloner. That will clone the recovery partition, as well.

Click to expand...

I'll look at that. Thanks.

But I'm also concerned about why this Mac-mini will not boot into the recovery tools. I vaguely remember when I set it up that it did not recognize the keyboard right off and I had to tell it what kind of keyboard it was. And it's worked fine ever since. But I'm wondering if that is now causing this problem with booting into recovery tools.

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CCC got the internal cloned to the external.

And going into Keyboard and running a redetect seems to have straightened out the keyboard.

Now holding down OptionKey on restart brought up the partitions list.

Only one minor problem left. My mouse was not working there to select one of the partitions. Had to tab through them and hit Enter.

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Booted the choices.

And now I get mouse movement during partition boot selection but only in the vertical direction. No horizontal. Weird.

Well, anyway, tabbing works.

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