Re-creating Lion Recovery Partition on Boot Drive?

[BC2009]

I tried searching this forum for a straight answer, but could not find it. Can somebody please tell me how to get Lion to repartition my hard drive and recreate the Recovery HD partition.

I was running out of space so I merged my two partitions, but of course the Lion Recovery HD was positioned squarely in between the two partitions I was merging. I have heard that you can "reinstall Lion" to recreate it. I have not tried that yet, but I was hoping for an easier way. Downloading Lion is going to take 2 hours, and quite frankly, once its done I'm guessing I'm going to have to reapply patches and such.

Is there a way to just tell Lion to repartition my drive and create a recovery partition? I wish this was a function of the Recovery Partition Assistant Tool, but alas it is not. In fact that tool does not even work if you don't have the Lion Recovery partition on your boot drive.

Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks!

 

[jman240]

That partition is supposed to be hidden, i think even in disk utility, by default. Did you purposefully delete it? I would imagine only a reinstall would do that but there's always Google searches heh. Have you tried booting up with the option key held down to see if the recovery partition is still there or not?

FYI: The Lion download will be the latest version from the MAS so no major patching required.

 

[BC2009]

That partition is supposed to be hidden, i think even in disk utility, by default. Did you purposefully delete it? I would imagine only a reinstall would do that but there's always Google searches heh. Have you tried booting up with the option key held down to see if the recovery partition is still there or not?

FYI: The Lion download will be the latest version from the MAS so no major patching required.

I had two 500GB partitions. When Lion installed it put the Recovery HD partition in between them so that disk0s0 was my first 499GB, disk0s1 was the Recovery HD and disk0s2 was my second 499GB partition.

I ran out of space on the first and needed to merge disk0s0 and disk0s2, which you can do via "diskutil mergePartitions JHFS+ disk0s0 disk0s2", however only the data on the first partition is preserved and all subsequent partitions up to and including the second partition are erased and merged with the first.

When I merged the partitions, it deleted the Recovery HD. I knew this would happen and actually made an external recovery partition on USB before doing it because I was not sure what the Lion installer was going to do (worst case scenario I would have to restore from Time Machine after a completely fresh reinstall).

However, it was much easier than the worst case. I downloaded the latest Lion from the MAS by holding the "option" key while on any tab but "Purchased" and then clicking "Purchased" with the option key held down. This allowed me to click "Install" for Lion even though it was already installed. It took hours to download, but then I just ran the installer again. It updated my system files and left all my user files intact. After the update I ran Software Update and found I needed to reinstall:
- iTunes 10.5.3
- iMac WiFi Update
- one other update (I forget which)

Also I found my "Messages" beta was gone and replaced with iChat, so I had to download and install that again. Only other thing that had problems was Xmarks complained about missing files and asked to be reinstalled.

So it seemed to go pretty well and my recovery partition is back and now my "Macintosh HD" partition is a full 1TB.