Cannot Start Recovery OS

[tjkilburn]

I installed Catalina on a 2009 MacPro using Catalina Patcher. All is working fine except I am unable to start up with the Recovery OS. cmd-r does not work, nor does sudo nvram "recovery-boot-mode=unused" from the Terminal. Any suggestions or explanations?

 

[casperes1996]

Since it's a 2009 Mac Pro; Do you have a boot screen capable GPU?
Are you sure the recovery partition is there?

I assume Internet Recovery isn't an option on the Mac Pro there, right?
You might want to make a bootable USB drive with recovery just in case

 

[tjkilburn]

Since it's a 2009 Mac Pro; Do you have a boot screen capable GPU?
Are you sure the recovery partition is there?

I assume Internet Recovery isn't an option on the Mac Pro there, right?
You might want to make a bootable USB drive with recovery just in case

The Recovery OS worked in Mojave prior to the upgrade to Catalina. Using diskutil list, APFS Recovery is disk4s3. cmd-option-r and cmd-option-shift-r do not appear to start up the Recovery OS either. I still have the USB installer with Catalina Patcher version so can start from external if needed. I guess that it's possible that the Recovery OS is not actually present. I will dig deeper to see. Thanks for your help.

 

[casperes1996]

The Recovery OS worked in Mojave prior to the upgrade to Catalina. Using diskutil list, APFS Recovery is disk4s3. cmd-option-r and cmd-option-shift-r do not appear to start up the Recovery OS either. I still have the USB installer with Catalina Patcher version so can start from external if needed. I guess that it's possible that the Recovery OS is not actually present. I will dig deeper to see. Thanks for your help.

Try
diskutil mount disk4s3
cd /Volumes/Recovery

and then check inside there if it has the boot.efi. Run bless on it

 

[tjkilburn]

thanks for this useful information. There is no boot.efi within my Recovery volume. I also checked for this on my 2017 MBP though and there is no boot.efi on it either. The Recovery OS does work on the MBP, so I'm thinking that may not be the issue. The MBP is encrypted with FV2, so has a slightly different map, but the PreBoot volume does not have a boot.efi either.

 

[casperes1996]

thanks for this useful information. There is no boot.efi within my Recovery volume. I also checked for this on my 2017 MBP though and there is no boot.efi on it either. The Recovery OS does work on the MBP, so I'm thinking that may not be the issue. The MBP is encrypted with FV2, so has a slightly different map, but the PreBoot volume does not have a boot.efi either.

... What? That's very strange to me.
Could you post what your Recovery disk's contents look like?
Mine's like this

 

[tjkilburn]

Thanks for the screen shot. I didn't realize that the item within the Recovery volume was a directory. Once inside, there is actually a boot.efi file amongst many other files. Sorry, I don't know the proper syntax for the "bless" command. I tried the "bless --getBoot" to see if I could determine proper syntax. It returned "/dev/disk4s5". I then tried "bless --setBoot /dev/disk4s3" which returned "No volume specified". I appreciate all your help.

 

[TimothyR734]

What version of the Catalina Patcher did you use Catalina Patcher 1.4.3 is supposed to fix the recovery

 

[tjkilburn]

Patcher version 1.4.1. thanks I will update and see how things proceed.

 

[haralds]

I use the "Catalina Recovery HD Partition" app to repair Recovery. Search for reference on this forum.