Customized Recovery partition?

[Nodarkthings]

I've always been a contrarian and it bothers me having a static Recovery partition that can only do what Apple offers. I'd really like to add utilities such as CCC or Techtool for example.
So I'm wondering if I could just replace the official APFS Recovery partition with a bare 10.14 with a bunch of useful utilities?
I guess I could but as I've not yet tinkered with APFS, I'm curious if anyone attempted something similar?

 

[FormerUser-400995]

I've always been a contrarian and it bothers me having a static Recovery partition that can only do what Apple offers. I'd really like to add utilities such as CCC or Techtool for example.
So I'm wondering if I could just replace the official APFS Recovery partition with a bare 10.14 with a bunch of useful utilities?
I guess I could but as I've not yet tinkered with APFS, I'm curious if anyone attempted something similar?

In principle, you could write a recovery partition to a USB drive, in much the same way as you do when building a bootable USB Installer. Instead of moving macOS to the USB, perhaps backup the existing recovery partition with Carbon Copy Cloner, and then restore it to the USB (not the EFI).

I noticed a project (or two) a few years ago, that focused on a similar process to build a custom rescue disk, much like the Linux based alternatives. What they were called, I don't remember, but a quick DuckDuckGoogle search will likely reveal all.

It would be an interesting project. Finding compatible software licensing for that kind of usage might be a royal pain in the butt, though.

Cheers.

 

[Nodarkthings]

Thanks for your input. Yes, I remember something like that too, but it's not worth the pain, at least for Mojave and older Oses as you just have to clone a working 10.14 anywhere and use that as a pseudo-Recovery — except that you waste a few GB (and you need one of those maintenance partitions for every version you use. That's what I've done until now (10.9, 10.11 and currently 10.14).
My purpose was to use the actual Recovery instead of those maintenance partitions, to reclaim the space they use.
I guess it might be feasible modifying the BaseSystem.dmg inside Recovery, I'll try that sometime. — of course I don't expect any kind of official support for that experiment...

 

[FormerUser-400995]

... of course I don't expect any kind of official support for that experiment...

Probably a fair appraisal.

 

[Nodarkthings]

I nearly got it working, taking inspiration from that old blog: https://jacobsalmela.com/2014/05/19/osx-customize-recovery-partition-with-your-own-apps/
Provided you make very few changes — as it's been written for 10.9 — it still works (at least here on 10.14).
Unfortunately, not all apps will work and sometimes for stupid details: I've tried with CCC and after adding the missing frameworks, prefs and CCC's folders, I'm stuck because CCC asks for an admin password in order to be able to modify its tasks, and of course there is none...
I suppose that it might work with some other app but in my case, it was really CCC that I was craving for.
The solution would probably be to create an admin account via Terminal commands, in order to use its password, but I won't lose any more time on this and stay with my usual maintenance partition.