Restore Mavericks Recovery Disk?

[terpstra]

A week ago my new shiny Haswell 13" pro arrived. It works great. Of course, I wanted to install debian on it. That worked out great too.

What was not so great? Shrinking my Mavericks partition in disk utility prior to installing debian killed the "recovery partition". Since this is quite handy to restore my system from TimeMachine in the case I have future problems, I would like to get this partition back.

I have a 650MB empty partition that I would like to restore the recovery partition into, but I don't see how to do this aside from people advising "reinstall Mavericks". However, I know that won't help me because the moment my system contains an LVM partition, Mavericks disk utility seems to be unable to modify the partition table. So a reinstall will probably fail to reinstall the recovery partition.

What I am considering doing: copy someone else's recovery partition to a dmg and restore that dmg onto my prepared 650MB partition.

Is there any problem with this approach? Is there some unique identifying information in the recovery partition such that it would not match my macbook any more? Or worse, cause problems for the person I clone it from?

 

[terpstra]

To answer my own question, I solved this using "command-R" at boot to trigger the "internet" recovery built into my macbook. Then I installed mavericks onto a USB stick and ripped the partition from there to my SSD using gdisk+cp under linux. Seems to work fine.

 

[crjackson2134]

Thanks for your work. Maybe it will help someone else down the road.