3week old iMac - mavericks 10.9 recovery partition broke

[dublove]

So this evening I turned on my new iMac and Mavericks didn't boot. Just stuck on the progress spinner. Strange as nothings changed and its been just fine.

I rebooted in safe mode and it loaded up, then restarted normally and it booted into Mavericks without issue.

So I did some googling and thought ah! Boot into recovery and run a disk utility repair.

HOWEVER I can't because the recovery partition is broken. Comes up with an error saying 'the osx installation couldn't be completed' which flashes up for a split second and then the mac shuts down. Video link of this in action;

When I hold cmd+r at startup it goes straight into internet recovery. That can't be right as thats the last resort. Physical disk recovery partition is 1st, if none then load internet recovery.
FYI, Find My Mac & Filevault work no problem... ( I read they need a rec partition to work!)

any ideas how to fix?

 

[dean1012]

I'm afraid my only advice is to visit an Apple store as soon as possible.

A failure like this within 3 weeks, on new or refurb, is a problem to be addressed by Apple.

 

[dublove]

I should add that i'm currently booting into my user account without issue - just no recovery.

I mounted the recovery partition using disk utility (developer mode). When I try to open base system.dmg on the recovery partition it tells me the dog is corrupt :/ This would definitely help explain why the recovery partition does not boot up...

The question is why is it corrupt - I did an upgrade to mavericks as soon as I first got the machine. Maybe the rec partition was bust at that stage, I never tried it so I don't know.

I just replaced the base system.dmg with the one buried inside the mavericks App Store installer. Hey presto I have a working recovery partition again!

I will call applecare though to log this issue just in case...