What is the recovery HD and features does it have?
By definition, the recovery HD is a partition of the hard drive on disk of a Mac device. A user can access it by rebooting Mac and holding down the Command + R keys in the process. All operational systems, starting with OS X Lion and further have the recovery feature available. The Recovery component appears to be really important as it may help a user to reinstall the OS, repair the hard drive or restore the OS after a backup. To enter the recovery mode on your device, press Command + R while the operational system reboots itself and keep holding the keys down until you see the Apple logo on the screen. The recovery mode on Mac shows a desktop with the menu bar of an OS X, as well as the window of OS X utilities where you can find such options as reinstalling the OS, repairing the HD or restoring the operating system after a backup, as mentioned above. Next, you need to choose a respective option from the utilities menu or window. Let’s take a quick look at the recovery HD features.Restoring Mac from Time Machine
Being a helpful and unique feature, available on all OS X’s, Time Machine helps you to back up all information and setting of your Mac, in any given day, to let user later restore their device to any required day in the past. Time Machine can back up one day, one week or a whole month. The issue with it is that once the backup drive is filled, the oldest of the backups are gradually deleted to free up more space for the latest backups.Installing or uninstalling OS X
Installing or uninstalling an operating system on your Mac is another powerful feature offered by Recovery HD. It lets you download any version of the OS X via the Internet. The advantage is that you won’t need any optical disk; however, you obviously will need a high-speed Internet connection.Repairing Mac’s disk
One of the main and most important features provided by the recovery mode is Mac’s Disk Utility. With its help, you can repair your Mac’s hard drive. To get started, you need to click on the option ‘Repair Disk.’ Besides, the Recovery feature will supply you with the information helpful in troubleshooting over the Web. Recovery HD will remove any contents of your Mac’s hard drive and will help you to restore it from any chosen backup on the Time Machine. Always remember to back up all your data before repairing Mac’s disk and do not perform this operation in the middle of some important task (i.e., writing your term paper)! Otherwise, you might find yourself in an urgent need of help with writing papers if your current assignment has been damaged, especially when the deadline is looming.What to do if the Recovery HD is locked?
In some cases, the Recovery HD may be locked. A user will be informed of it with an error notification, saying: ‘hard drive locked.’ To have the problem resolved, you should open Disk Utility. Next, after clicking on the hard drive, select “Enable Journaling.” This should help to unlock your Mac’s hard drive.
How to unlock the Recovery HD on OS X Lion
The process of restoring HD will erase everything on Mac’s hard drive. That’s why make sure to back up all its contents to external storage, the second internal drive or the cloud.- Restart Mac, press and hold Command + R keys down until a menu appears on the screen.
- In the Menu, choose ‘Disk Utility, next click the button ‘’
- In the Utility menu, choose your Startup volume which in most cases is called Macintosh HD.
- You need to set the type of the format for Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Click the button Security and select Zero Data from the list of options to set
- Click Erase and wait until the process is fully completed.
- Close Disk Utility menu and go to the main menu.
- There, select ‘reinstall’ and hit the button ‘’ Make sure that your Internet connection is fast and steady enough during this process.