Deleting the OsX Mountain Lion Recovery partition [Tutorial]

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Published on Wednesday, 01 August 2012 22:07

This is a simple but not a straight forward process. You may need to do this for several reasons, I needed it for successfully booting OsX Mountain Lion and Windows 8 with a shared third partition. If you want to remove the “Recovery HD” partition, you’ll need to do a little bit of work because it’s a hidden partition.

Finally, if you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t play around with partitions, diskutil, merging, or anything else, you could easily screw something up and lose all of your data.

Deleting the OsX Mountain Lion 10.8 Recovery HD partition can be achieved in a very simple way. There are a few ways to go about doing this, all methods will result in data loss. We will be deleting and merging a partition with diskutil from the command line. This is the most precise method I know of to remove the partition since it targets the recovery disk directly and merges it with the full Lion partition – if you’re not comfortable with the command line this is not for you.

• Launch the Terminal and type the following into the command line:

diskutil list

• This will print out your drives partition scheme and look something like this:

• Look for “Recovery HD” and see which identifier it is using, it this screenshot it’s disk0s4
• To remove that partition we use the following command (you can also use the volume name):

diskutil eraseVolume HFS+ Blank /dev/disk0s4

• The partition will be erased, you might want to do this with your standard Lion partition as well since you’ll be wiping the entire thing anyway. Regardless, you’ll now have a blank partition sitting around, so you’ll want to merge that with your other Lion partition:

diskutil mergePartitions HFS+ Lion disk0s3 disk0s4

• This will merge the two partitions, with disk0s3 absorbing the space from disk0s4 and expanding, it causes data loss so don’t expect this to preserve anything.