More About Recovery HD in Mountain lion

Although there are many excellent features of Montain Lion, but I liked 'Recovery mode' the most and hope you will never need to use. First we should know what exactly Recovery HD is and then its uses.

Recovery HD is basically a partition which comes into play when you install either Mac Lion or Mounain Lion on your Mac. The installer of Mountain Lion creates an invisible, 650MB partition. This bootable partition is the portion of the drive which is treated as seperate volume by operating system.

Basically, recovery HD resides in startup disk. And the concept behind recovery mode is if you ever face any problem with your Mac startup disk, then you can boot your Machine using this Recovery HD.

So, generally, recovery HD includes fixing problems, restoring files and to perform some basic troubleshooting operations.

Conditions of getting Recovery HD partition during installation:

I have read many questions in comments regarding Recovery HD. Recently I found one in which user asked that; “Does recovery HD partition created in all cases at the time of installation, as some users didn't find this partition after installation, why is it so.

So, that is what I have explained below.

In our research, it is found that this special partition(Recovery mode)appears only when your internal drive formatted with GUID partition scheme and Mac OS Extended format, and its size must be of 13GB.

 

In additin that drive must having only single partition, can be partitioned in Boot camp Assistant but in case of multi-partition only.

Use of recovery mode:

You can use Recovery mode for booting your Mac during any problem including crash of your Mac. So here we don't require any OS X installation DVD or separate bootable hard drive for fixing or resolving such problems.

You can boot from this whatever be the reason/ issue by holding key R while restarting your Mac. It shows you the list of all available OS in your Mac including Recovery HD (Lion /Mountain lion). So by making double click to it you can boot through this mode.

Recovery HD is the utility by which you can also fix some problems. Now, as I explained above you can boot even in case of OS crash. It remains on drive even it has been erased. This is because it is invisible (even in Disk utility) and also read only.

So, you might be thinking of keeping your favourite third party tool onto it in order to make it available always in recovery mode. Unfortunately it can't be possible as it is invisible , So you can't have access to it-­-­- recovery mode is inaccessable.

But we can make recovery HD accessable only during startup or booting your Mac in two ways that we will discuss further. So this point we will covering in our new article.

Alternate of recovery HD in Mountain Lion

Recovery HD can't help us in every case or issue because we know that Recovery HD partition is actually the part of your Mac’s internal hard drive or SSD, if that drive gets some physical problem, the recovery partition itself is inaccessible. In other words, you will require something that can save you from every problem. So, its nice idea to use some suitable software as a substitute for it. I will personaly suggest you to go for Stellar Drive Clone for taking backup and also have amazing feature of making clone of recovery HD automatically in order to make your Mac more secure from any data disaster. Your recovery HD during installation resides automatically in startup list.

I want to add one important feature of this software to give support to SSD, Ex-Fat, NTFS+ file system in its latest version 2.5.