OS X Recovery will not start for me

[silwyth88]

Hey everybody, hoping somebody will be able to help me out,

I have a late 2011 MBP. I do a lot of video editing and I make a point of frequently using disk utility to stay on top of my boot drives health.

When scanning today I was informed that mac needed to enter OS X Recovery to perform a proper repair job.

So I restart holding cmd & r, but instead of OS X Recovery it immediately started loading Internet Recovery. If I'm not mistaken, Internet Recovery will just straight up reinstall Lion 10.7, is this right?

There's no visible issues with Lion, I just decided to do it cause I was told to.

All I want is to enter Recovery HD so I can repair my volume.

Any ideas guys?

 

[silwyth88]

I guess the further question is; Will Internet Recovery only reinstall OS Lion? Or will it give me the option of OS X Recovey with Disk Utility etc?

 

[harryb2448]

G'day and welcome to the forums.

As it came with Lion, Internet Recovery is what you should allow to run if the hard drive has failed or has serious problems.. Have a read of this Apple Support page on Recovery:-

OS X: About OS X Recovery

 

[silwyth88]

Thanks for the greeting

I hate to sound dumb, but I read it and came to the conclusion that it must also allow me to use the OS X Recovery disk utility, but if memory from previous experience is correct, all Internet Recovery did was reinstll Lion via the net which took hours..

She's running ok, it just said in Verify Disk it needed to be repaired via OS X Recovery..

Am I missing something glaringly simple here?

 

[chscag]

You should be able to boot to the "Recovery" partition in Lion without going through Internet Recovery. I'm not sure why it's giving you the Internet Recovery option. If you can get into recovery, select "Utilities" and then "Disk Utility". It's from there that you can verify and repair your hard drive.

However, if your machine is running normally without problems, why are you constantly checking the hard drive? The old adage "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"! applies.

 

[bobtomay]

The option key is used to boot to the Recovery Partition
Command + R is used to boot to Internet Recovery.

They both provide access to Disk Utility.

 

[chas_m]

It is possible that if the Lion install on the boot drive is from a pirated copy, it won't have the Recovery Partition. However, if that's not the case, what bobtomay said should work.

 

[chscag]

Actually, holding down the Option key upon boot up gives you a choice of booting either to your Macintosh HD (or whatever you call it) or the Recovery partition. If you boot to Recovery, you then have the choice to run Time Machine, reinstall, Disk Utility, etc.

Holding down command + r boots the machine to the Recovery partition and opens the same dialog that offers the choice of restoring from Time Machine, reinstall, Disk Utility, etc. In either case it does not automatically go into Internet Recovery unless you choose reinstall.

Which is why I think there's a problem with the OP's hard drive. And, I agree with chas, if there is no Recovery partition for some reason, it will likely go to Internet Recovery to reinstall.

 

[bobtomay]

Just had to reboot and verify to make sure.
My '11 MBA with 10.8 does exactly as the op is describing.

Command + R boots directly into Internet Recovery (several minute boot time).
To boot to the Recovery Partition (15 second boot time), I have to use the option key while booting to get access to it.
However, either one of them do offer exactly the same dialogue box with access to Disk Utility.

 

[chscag]

Before I replied above, I ran the same tests on my iMac. (OS X ML) It responded exactly how I described it. I think it's a matter of semantics.....