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Can i nuke the Recovery Partition?

daneoni

daneoni

macrumors G5
Original poster
Mar 24, 2006
12,046
1,961
I wanted to find out if there are any major downsides to yanking the Recovery Partition besides losing the ability to...recover.

I have an external bootable Lion installer, and i backup regularly. So if worst comes to worst i know how to get back on my feet.

I just can't seem to ignore the fact that over half a gigabyte of my precious disk space is sitting there largely unused for a 'just in case' scenario.
 
daneoni said:
I wanted to find out if there are any major downsides to yanking the Recovery Partition besides losing the ability to...recover.

I have an external bootable Lion installer, and i backup regularly. So if worst comes to worst i know how to get back on my feet.

I just can't seem to ignore the fact that over half a gigabyte of my precious disk space is sitting there largely unused for a 'just in case' scenario.
Click to expand...
You could, but if you're playing your free disk space that closely, you probably have too much stored on it, anyway. It's a good idea to leave about 10% free space... more is better. Rather than nuking the Recovery Partition, I'd recommend off-loading some of your user files to an external hard drive. Perhaps splitting your iTunes library or moving other less-often-used files to the external.
 
No, no problem doing it. What computer do you have? Is it one that is capable of Internet recovery? If so, you can boot from that if totally necessary
 
GGJstudios said:
You could, but if you're playing your free disk space that closely, you probably have too much stored on it, anyway. It's a good idea to leave about 10% free space... more is better. Rather than nuking the Recovery Partition, I'd recommend off-loading some of your user files to an external hard drive. Perhaps splitting your iTunes library or moving other less-often-used files to the external.
Click to expand...

I have. There's still about 37GB Free which is plenty but still...every little that i can recoup helps

blevins321 said:
No, no problem doing it. What computer do you have? Is it one that is capable of Internet recovery? If so, you can boot from that if totally necessary
Click to expand...

Early '11 so yes.
 
You can nuke it, but to each his own. Mine is only 650mb so not worth it in my opinion.
 
I also believe you need to have the recovery partition if you ever want to use FileVault 2 on any of your drives.
 
The recovery partition seems daft on a 64GB MBA. I think Apple should have it automatically disabled (available to be enabled manually through system preferences) on 64GB Mac models.
 
what about booting while holding option? still there is recovery is deleted?

but seriously, do you really need that much space? i too use the thumb drive but better safe than sorry.
 
bdodds1985 said:
what about booting while holding option? still there is recovery is deleted?

but seriously, do you really need that much space? i too use the thumb drive but better safe than sorry.
Click to expand...

Still there but Recovery is gone. If i had 1TB of storage i wouldn't blink but i only have a 256GB SSD and a big chunk is filled with pro apps.
 
daneoni said:
Still there but Recovery is gone. If i had 1TB of storage i wouldn't blink but i only have a 256GB SSD and a big chunk is filled with pro apps.
Click to expand...

I have about 240GB split into two ssd's with photoshop, lightroom, plus a bunch of other apps and still have about 150GB free. even if I had 10GB left of storage which is something only novice users usually do, I would still keep the recovery partition on my HD.
 
bdodds1985 said:
I have about 240GB split into two ssd's with photoshop, lightroom, plus a bunch of other apps and still have about 150GB free. even if I had 10GB left of storage which is something only novice users usually do, I would still keep the recovery partition on my HD.
Click to expand...

I've only just migrated from Snow Leopard whose partition i have yet to delete...i'll probably reinstate recovery once i'm fully comfortable with Lion and wipe out my SL partition.
 
daneoni said:
I wanted to find out if there are any major downsides to yanking the Recovery Partition besides losing the ability to...recover.

I have an external bootable Lion installer, and i backup regularly. So if worst comes to worst i know how to get back on my feet.

I just can't seem to ignore the fact that over half a gigabyte of my precious disk space is sitting there largely unused for a 'just in case' scenario.
Click to expand...

You can't enable filevault, and you can't use "Find my Mac" as others have said, and I can verify by personal experience.
 
techmonkey said:
I want to triple boot my MBP (Lion, Win7, Win8). Since only 4 partitions are supported, I need to remove the Lion Recovery partition. Will using the guide below to delete my Lion Recovery partition do any harm to my Lion OS partition and Win7 partition?

I found this guide here -> http://osxdaily.com/2011/06/30/delet...-hd-partition/
Click to expand...

Only 4 partitions supported by what? You can make a drive with 20+ partitions if you really want (I have one at work with 14), so I'm not sure where the limitation is coming from.

If you use Boot Camp, be aware that any modification to the partition structure could cause problems with the hybrid GUID/MBR partition map scheme that Boot Camp sets up. It's possible to do it, just make sure you find a guide specifically for that situation.

jW
 
Mal said:
Only 4 partitions supported by what? You can make a drive with 20+ partitions if you really want (I have one at work with 14), so I'm not sure where the limitation is coming from.

If you use Boot Camp, be aware that any modification to the partition structure could cause problems with the hybrid GUID/MBR partition map scheme that Boot Camp sets up. It's possible to do it, just make sure you find a guide specifically for that situation.

jW
Click to expand...

Bear said:
If the limit is 4 (which it isn't) 3 boot partitions plus the Lion Recovery Partition is 4 partitions. What's the issue?
Click to expand...

Sorry, I should have more clear. The MBR only support (4) primary partitions. In my case, I already have four.

1 - EFI partition
2 - Lion OS
3 - Lion Recovery
4 - Win7

http://wiki.onmac.net/index.php/Triple_Boot_via_BootCamp
 
Figure I post this, may help others. I ended up creating a VHD in Win7 and installed Win8 to that. Message me for more details if you are interested.
 
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