Try Safe Boot Restart your Mac while holding down the Shift key to perform a Safe Boot. Instead, boot from the drive directly, as I just described. However, if you are using a cloned drive, I wouldn’t bother with its Recovery HD partition in any case. If you used Bombich Software’s $40 Carbon Copy Cloner, it should. If you used Shirt Pocket’s $28 SuperDuper to make a clone, the clone will likely not have the Recovery HD partition. You may be wondering: “Does my clone drive include a Recovery HD partition? Could I start up from that partition instead?” Maybe. When startup is complete, you’ll find Disk Utility in the /Applications/Utilities folder, just as it is on your original drive. From the screen that appears, select the cloned drive. To do so, restart while holding down the Option key. If you created a clone of your startup drive, you can boot from the clone and run Disk Utility from there. Launch Disk Utility, choose your startup drive in the list, and select Repair Disk. Once booted, things should work nearly identically to starting up from the Recovery HD partition.

From the screen that appears, select the emergency drive. Restart while holding down the Option key. If you previously created an emergency drive (see “Mac troubleshooting: Be prepared for hard-drive failure”), now is the time to use it. In either case, it’s time to move on to the next repair attempts.īoot from your emergency drive If you’ve prepared ahead, you can boot your Mac from your emergency flash drive and perform repairs. If you are unable to boot Recovery HD via either of these methods, it means there is no Recovery HD partition on your drive or your drive is too damaged to allow successful booting from the partition.

From Recovery HD, you can also browse the Web for troubleshooting info using Safari as well as erase your startup drive and restore its contents from a Time Machine backup. You should now be able to select Repair Disk for that drive. Open Disk Utility and locate the name of your startup drive. If you are able to boot from Recovery HD, Disk Utility will be one of its four main options. To be able to repair your normal startup drive, choose the Recovery drive (Recovery-10.8.1 here) from the Startup Manager.

Mac hard drive repair utility