OS X Lion Recovery Drive VANISHED

[mad cow disease]

I had the recovery drive there about 2-3 months ago the last time I did some routine maintenance. Fast forward to today, and it is gone. Has vanished. I haven't restored, wiped, or done anything significant with the system in months besides install routine updates.

Yes, I have tried looking under disk utility to see if the drive is there. It isn't It doesn't appear under the list of bootable drives when hitting option at startup. It isn't in the list of startup disks. It doesn't appear when I hit command-R at startup.

What is going on? Anybody have insight? I'm considering just dropping back down to 10.6, which was infinitely more reliable...and less of a system hog, too.

 

[Nermal]

Please post the output of "diskutil list".

 

[mad cow disease]

/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *200.0 GB disk0
1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Brianna 199.7 GB disk0s2
/dev/disk1
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *639.4 GB disk1
1: EFI 209.7 MB disk1s1
2: Apple_HFS 640 GB 639.1 GB disk1s2
/dev/disk2
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: CD_partition_scheme *804.4 MB disk2
1: Apple_partition_scheme 700.4 MB disk2s0
2: Apple_partition_map 32.3 KB disk2s0s1
3: Apple_HFS WD SmartWare 274.9 MB disk2s0s2


Like I said above...NOT THERE.

 

[Nermal]

Like I said above...NOT THERE.

Yes, I did actually believe you

The interesting thing is that the totals all seem to add up; there isn't a "gap" where the partition would usually sit. Therefore it wasn't just deleted, but the HFS partition was resized to fill the space. Have you ever used Boot Camp on that machine?

 

[Weaselboy]

I had the recovery drive there about 2-3 months ago the last time I did some routine maintenance. Fast forward to today, and it is gone. Has vanished. I haven't restored, wiped, or done anything significant with the system in months besides install routine updates.

I can't think of any possible way it would disappear on its own.

If you want to get it back, just reinstall Lion from the App Store and it will put it back. Backup just to safe, but this will not erase your data.