Accidentally overwritten Macintosh recovery partition when installing Ubuntu

About a month ago I ditched macOS for Ubuntu on my iMac Late 2009. During the installation I explicitly told Ubuntu to leave the Macintosh recovery partition alone. It did not. I now wish to go back to macOS and I’ve tried the usual CTRL-R variants to enter recovery mode, and I have tried resetting the PRAM. But now I have confirmed that the recovery partition has been overwritten.

So I fired up a VM with a copy of macOS Sierra, downloaded Sierra from the Apple Store and ran createinstallmedia. Hitting option during boot doesn’t show the bootable USB. The usb was reformatted even before I ran createinstallmedia with Journaled GUID.

I’m sure I’m missing something, has anybody ran into this type of issue before?

Christian Wiles

Posted 2019-01-31T19:47:38.817

Reputation: 11

You may want to ask your question here: https://discussions.apple.com/community/desktop_computers/imac_intel

– historystamp – 2019-02-01T04:14:54.770

As you have a running VM, you've potentially a method to use something like Carbon Copy Cloner to get that VM onto the other Mac's drive. CCC will also recreate the recovery partition as part of the process. [I've never actually tried it from a VM, but it might be worth a shot.]

– Tetsujin – 2019-02-01T08:13:18.430

Answers

You machine doesn't support internet recovery. The earliest machines with a firmware update to support internet recovery came out in 2010. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202313

Looks like your machine came with a dvd. You will need to borrow or buy macos on a dvd. You need to find a dvd with an macOS equal to or later than. Original OS Mac OS X 10.6.1 (10A2155) Later OS Mac OS X 10.6.2 (10C2234)

It might be easier to get a full install dvd for macos 10.7.

You could try cloning a macos system less than or equal to Maximum OS macOS 10.13.6 (17G65) Typically the last support os runs slow.

Apple still seems to be selling 10.7. https://www.apple.com/shop/product/D6106Z/A/os-x-lion I bought it once. I remember it came as a download. I do not know if you will be able to install it on your machine. You may be able to convert the download to a boot usb flash drive install. You will need another machine to do this.

historystamp

Posted 2019-01-31T19:47:38.817

Reputation: 173

You can still download the Lion Recovery Disk creator free from Apple here which can be used to recreate recovery partition. See this answer

– lx07 – 2019-02-01T09:16:33.327

Good to know. You point to an interesting article. – historystamp – 2019-02-01T20:36:58.307