[Solved] How to remove High Sierra Recovery partition??

[spotcatbug]

Does anybody have any info on how to safely remove a Recovery partition in High Sierra? I believe (not sure at all) there are Core Storage issues to worry about.

I have had a lot of trouble installing macOS updates. When it fails (pretty much always), it's because I don't see the "Install macOS from..." option in the Clover GUI after the installer does it's first reboot. When it works, I see "Install macOS from Recovery HD..." The installer wants to use my Recovery partition for it's intermediate, installation boot step. I don't know why it mostly fails to work (not enough room? could be any number of things). I've posted about this a couple (few?) times before. I'm not really looking for help on this anymore - seems I'm all alone on this issue.

However, now that I have a Recovery boot flash drive, I don't care about the Recovery partition. I'd like to completely nuke it. Hopefully that will make future updates do the right thing with respect to the intermediate install boot.

Here's what my diskutil list looks like:

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *2.0 TB     disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:          Apple_CoreStorage Hackfish                2.0 TB     disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3

/dev/disk1 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk1
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk1s1
   2:                 Apple_RAID                         999.9 GB   disk1s2

/dev/disk2 (internal, virtual):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                  Apple_HFS Hackfish               +2.0 TB     disk2
                                 Logical Volume on disk0s2
                                 D2CBFFE2-4BDE-4BF2-93A0-3DA27EF8F434
                                 Unencrypted

/dev/disk3 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk3
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk3s1
   2:                 Apple_RAID                         499.8 GB   disk3s2

/dev/disk4 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk4
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk4s1
   2:                 Apple_RAID                         499.8 GB   disk4s2

/dev/disk5 (internal, virtual):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                  Apple_HFS CloneRAID              +2.0 TB     disk5

The boot drive is "Hackfish". Basically, disk0 with disk2 (core storage split it up like that). I'm trying to remove disk0s3 (Recovery HD).

 

[spotcatbug]

I do believe I've done it. "Recovery HD" partition is gone. More importantly, everything I wanted to keep is not gone (phew!).

Since nobody was responding, I decided I would just find the best information I could (Google, Google, Google), make a good backup, and jump in head first. I seemed to come out the other end totally unscathed.

You become fairly emboldened, once you get to a place where you're thinking, "Well, if my HD gets erased, I'll just start from scratch and restore from backup - that'll get rid of the Recovery HD partition for sure." Plus, I have a Recovery flash drive that is custom for my rig, so a lot of bad can happen and I'm still going to recover pretty easily (if not quickly.)

I'm a little worried about detailing what I did here for fear that somebody might follow blindly and lose stuff. However, I think I should detail this, simply because there's basically nothing that Google showed me that fits this particular situation. The closest I got was removing an EFI partition, but that was from before Core Storage (Lion? Back when the old Disk Utility was still around.) That was the info I followed, basically.

One thing that I haven't yet been able to test is to see if I have truly "fixed" anything with respect to macOS updates. That was my whole reason for getting rid of the Recovery HD partition in the first place. Now that the partition is gone, is the installer going to do the right thing (whatever that is), or get mad that it can't find the partition it's looking for and give up completely? From my previous posts on this topic, I really feel I am somehow the only person affected by this issue, so there may be no real reason for anybody else to remove the partition (spoiler: you won't get the free space back anyway.)

Well, here goes...

0. Make a good, working backup. Think about how you're going to recreate your hackintosh if you need to start from scratch if this somehow destroys everything. Your backup won't do your Clover stuff for you. You need to be able to get to where you're installing macOS and restoring from your backup.

1. It may not be necessary, but I wouldn't want to be booted from the hard drive that I'm messing with. Boot a Recovery flash drive or some other bootable drive that has the Terminal app.
2. Once booted, launch Terminal.
3. Find the Recovery HD for removal by entering

diskutil list

The relevant part of my list looked like this:

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):[/INDENT]
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *2.0 TB     disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:          Apple_CoreStorage Hackfish                2.0 TB     disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3

/dev/disk1 (internal, virtual):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                  Apple_HFS Hackfish               +2.0 TB     disk1
                                 Logical Volume on disk0s2
                                 D2CBFFE2-4BDE-4BF2-93A0-3DA27EF8F434
                                 Unencrypted

"Hackfish" is my main HD and I want to get rid of "Recovery HD" (disk0s3).
​

4. Optional: mount the Recovery HD to get drive sizes (to see how you miss out later) by entering

diskutil mount /dev/disk0s3

Of course replace "disk0s3" with whatever your Recovery HD identifier is. To see the size of your hard drive, enter

df

Find /Volumes/Hackfish (of course it will show your drive name instead of mine) and write down the number of 512-blocks. Similarly, find /Volumes/Recovery HD and write down the number of 512-blocks (mine was 1269536, which is exactly 512MB.)
​

5. Unmount the disk that has the Recovery HD partition by entering

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk0

Note this is /dev/disk0, not /dev/disk0s3 - we're unmounting the whole disk, not just the partition. Also, check your disk number, it might not be 0. Indeed, these numbers can change between boots. Always do "diskutil list" to get the current numbers.
​

6. Finally, to remove the Recovery HD partition, enter

gpt remove -i 3 disk0

Replace the "3" above with whatever partition number Recovery HD is. If Recovery HD is disk0s3, like mine, you want 3. If it's disk12s32, you want "32" instead of "3". Also, replace "disk0" with whatever disk the partition is on. If Recovery HD is disk12s32, you want "disk12" instead of "disk0".
​

7. Reboot your hackintosh as normal. Good to go.

At this point, you can do a "diskutil list" again to see that the partition is gone. "df" will show you that you didn't magically recover the space from the deleted partition. If you go into Disk Utility, select your disk and click "Partition," in the pie chart (goofy) you'll see a tiny sliver labeled "Free Space." I tried to remove that. It gave me an error, but then the free space was gone from the pie chart so I thought it had worked; however, "df" showed that my HD was still the same size. I'm curious to know if anybody else manages to recover that space, small as it is. Perhaps macOS requires 512MB of free space at the end of the HD? Specifically for updates?​

 

[bgausden]

For any future readers, this is *not* recommended and is not how you'd hide the recovery volume in the Clover GUI.

 

[spotcatbug]

For any future readers, this is *not* recommended and is not how you'd hide the recovery volume in the Clover GUI.

I have to agree. While I didn't have any issues after doing what I describe, it didn't solve my problem. In the end, to fix my problem re. installing macOS updates (this wasn't just about hiding the recovery volume,) I cloned my drive, re-formatted and restored. It was a longer process, but the right way to fix whatever was wrong with my setup. No more weird installation issues.