I usually make a clone of my drive onto an external and use that for recovery; when I need a recovery partition it's most often when the whole drive has failed, and then the Apple-installed partition is worthless.
But now I want to make what is essentially a custom recovery partition. I don't know if Apple's Recovery Disk Assistant works with Yosemite, but IIRC it basically cloned your existing official recovery partition. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I would prefer to make my own so that I could include some tools that Apple doesn't provide (some disk utilities and other stuff).
And I'd like to make it as small as possible. I've read that you can fit Yosemite on as small as 8GB, but I know from past experience that sometimes you must start with more even if you subsequently pare it down to that size. Anyone know?
Finally, I'm wondering about whether using a partition on an existing external USB 3.0, Thunderbolt, or USB thumbdrive would be the most reliable when the regular boot drive is hosed. With a PC I'm used to forcing the machine to use the USB when stuff is going haywire via the BIOS, but there isn't really something comparable on the Mac. Using option to get the startup manager has sometimes failed me.
Thanks.
But now I want to make what is essentially a custom recovery partition. I don't know if Apple's Recovery Disk Assistant works with Yosemite, but IIRC it basically cloned your existing official recovery partition. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I would prefer to make my own so that I could include some tools that Apple doesn't provide (some disk utilities and other stuff).
And I'd like to make it as small as possible. I've read that you can fit Yosemite on as small as 8GB, but I know from past experience that sometimes you must start with more even if you subsequently pare it down to that size. Anyone know?
Finally, I'm wondering about whether using a partition on an existing external USB 3.0, Thunderbolt, or USB thumbdrive would be the most reliable when the regular boot drive is hosed. With a PC I'm used to forcing the machine to use the USB when stuff is going haywire via the BIOS, but there isn't really something comparable on the Mac. Using option to get the startup manager has sometimes failed me.
Thanks.