Creating Recovery Partitions

Allen Golbig has an article on AFP548 on creating a package that will create or update a Recovery partition on a Lion or Mountain Lion volume.

The solution requires you get a few pieces from Apple:

1. The BaseSystem.dmg and BaseSystem.chunklist from an InstallESD.dmg; found inside “Install Mac OS X Lion.app” or “Install OS X Mountain Lion.app”
2. Apple’s Lion Recovery Update package.

Additionally, Allen’s solution requires the use of Joe Block’s The Luggage, which in turn requires Xcode (or at least the Xcode command line tools) and PackageMaker.

Since getting all of that running might be a nasty hurdle to jump for some, I’ve put together a package template you can use. It’s available here.

To use it, you’ll still need to obtain the dmtest tool from the Lion Recovery Update package and the BaseSystem.dmg and BaseSystem.chunklist from an InstallESD.dmg.

pkgutil --expand RecoveryHDUpdate.pkg ./RecoveryUpdate
cd ./RecoveryUpdate/RecoveryHDUpdate.pkg/Scripts/Tools/
cp dmtest /path/to/CreateRecoveryPartition.pkg/Contents/Resources/



hdiutil attach /path/to/InstallESD.dmg -noverify
cp /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Install\ ESD/BaseSystem.* /path/to/CreateRecoveryPartition.pkg/Contents/Resources/
hdiutil eject /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Install\ESD/


When you are done, CreateRecoveryPartition.pkg/Contents/Resources/ should contain:

BaseSystem.chunklist
BaseSystem.dmg
dmtest
en.lproj/
package_version
postflight


You’re done unless you’d like to edit the package identifier and/or version in CreateRecoveryPartition.pkg/Contents/Info.plist.

You can now use this package to install a Recovery partition (or update an existing partition).