macOS 10.13.1 Is my Recovery HD crippled ?

[michelangelo]

Hello

After upgrading to High Sierra (10.13.1), I tried to create a DiskWarrior Recovery disk with Diskwarrior Recovery Maker (which makes use of the Recovery Partition). The opened window indicated at "Source OS X recovery disk" that: "No suitable OS X Recovery Disks found". Uho !

I restarted the mac and held down the Option Key while the mac was restarting. Only my start-up disk appeared, not the recovery Partition.

I restarted the mac again and held down cmd-R while the mac was restarting, the mac booted on the recovery partition.

I did it again, with the same results.

So the recovery partition is there but does not appear to Diskwarrior Recovery Maker and does not show when I hold down the option key on restart.

Is there anything wrong with my recovery HD ?

When this thread is over, I will if needed enquire from the Diskwarrior people, but do not believe, so far, that the issue is in their court.

Is there a method for recreating or rejuvenating the recovery HD ?

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What did I do before ? Upgrade the day before to High Sierra from a High Sierra installer flash drive (from Sierra 10.12.6). The process I followed is below it this could be relevant.

1 - I had first installed the Security Update for Sierra consistent with the High Sierra 10.13.0 to 10.13.1 updater.

2 - I downloaded the macOS High Sierra 10.13.1 installer from the App Store, saved a copy on an external drive, which I disconnected. I then created from my main HD using DiskMaker X 7 for High Sierra a bootable macOS High Sierra installer. Reason: I have an iMac to upgrade as well and I want to keep the flash disk installer to be on the safe side.

3 - I backed up, restarted from a Diskwarrior bootable thumb drive (OS 10.12.1 and Diskwarrior 5.0), ran Diskwarrior on my hard drive. No problems. I optimized my main HD. I then ran disk Utilities on my HD. No problems either.

4 - I restarted on my bootable macOS High Sierra installer thumb drive and installed from there High Sierra (normal install, not a clean install). It went fine.

5 - At the end of the process, (1) the High Sierra installer which was in my Applications folder had disappeared, and (2) the Sierra installer 10.12.1 (or 10.12.3, I am not sure) which was still sitting there in my Application folder was rendered unusable.

Apparently, with the sole exception of the above, the mac works normally under High Sierra.

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TIA for any hint.

 

[MacInWin]

Does your Mac have an SSD? If so, it was repartitioned to APFS, the new formatting scheme from Apple. APFS does not use a traditional partitioning scheme. That may be the problem, if Diskwarrior has not updated.

Here is a quick read for APFS: https://blog.macsales.com/42830-can-apfs-be-used-with-time-machine-boot-camp-and-file-vault

 

[michelangelo]

Glad you replied, Jake, glad I asked. YES, my mac has an SSD, and looking at the resource you quoted, YES I use CCC and have two bootable clones, one from last sunday 4th November while my weekday clone, which ran this morning at 00:05 is already overwritten by the new install. I looked at CCC's advices (never too late) and the strong recommendation is to keep a bootable duplicate at hand since the mac cannot revert to 10.12 otherwise.

So I booted from last sunday's clone and sloooowly but surely, it worked its magic !!! I just put this now essential hard drive (A 8.7 years old LaCie Big drive which I have never dared to throw away) into a safe. CCC will not overwrite it.

So,

1 - with regards to Diskwarrior (my side-question), I checked on their website. They state that Diskwarrior is compatible with High Sierra but "Apple File System (APFS) disks are not currently supported". They have updated the DiskWarrior recovery Maker. I believe I had updated already but did it again.

No change: Diskwarrior recovery maker still states: "No suitable OS X Recovery Disks found". this is a question which I just asked (5' ago) from the DiskWarrior folks. I will report here.

2 - with regards to my main question, if I restart the mac and hold down the Option Key while the mac is restarting, only my start-up disk appears, not the recovery Partition. This question remains unclear to me and out of reach of any Diskwarrior-related issue.

Any hint ?

Is there a method for recreating or rejuvenating the recovery HD ?

 

[MacInWin]

I will have to defer that question to someone much more knowledgable than I on the new APFS. I do remember reading that the "container" (I think that's the term), for recovery will appear when summoned, but I don't know if Option is the summoning key any more.

 

[ferrarr]

" if I restart the mac and hold down the Option Key while the mac is restarting, only my start-up disk appears, not the recovery Partition."

I did this too, after I upgraded to High Sierra. You have to boot into the Recovery partition, by using "command+R".

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201314

edit: here's the thread I started on it, Recovery partition?

 

[michelangelo]

Thanks Jake and Bob. I thought I had done my homework, but had not seen Bob's post.Sorry about that:Blushing:. I feel better now. I expect also to receive a reply from DiskWarrior. I gave them a link to this thread so they should now (at the minimum) know that my mac exhibited a normal behaviour.

 

[michelangelo]

I received a reply from Alsoft (DiskWarrior) today. They are currently at work on Diskwarrior and on Diskwarrior recovery maker, which means they plan to update but, for all practical reasons, have not done so yet.

"The drive is formatted as APFS. It is not useable with the present version of DiskWarrior Recovery Maker.

For all publicly available information regarding DiskWarrior 5.0 and macOS 10.13 (High Sierra), as well as the new Apple File System (APFS), please visit:

<https://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/highsierraapfs.html>"

Question closed for me. Thank you all.