If due to certain circumstances the recovery partition is not created during installation you can use Mac OS X recovery USB drive.

It provides you with all the tools you my need to troubleshoot problems, reinstall OS X, repair the hard drive and restore from a Time Machine backup.

Recovery USB drive works even if your internal hard drive is damaged.

These are the following major reasons, why we should create a Mac recovery USB drive? Though, this is a convenient method but it may take ages to download the essential recovery software to boot from internet if you are connected to a slow internet plan or you do not have an internet access at all.

And those Macs purchased after Jwhen OS X Lion was released got an additional feature called Internet Recovery, which downloads the essential recovery software contents from internet to network boot your Mac.This becomes handy when your internal Mac’s hard drive is damaged or recovery partition is missing. Starting from OS X Lion 10.7, Apple stopped shipping DVDs of its operating systems and started offering a built-in recovery partition that is created automatically for you during installation.

Why and when should we create a Mac OS X recovery USB drive?

To recover your data in case of crash or system failure.

To get help Online using Safari from recovery partition in case of no boot issue.

To run repair and maintenance task for the internal hard drive.

To reset the Mac administrator password.

It even has Safari that you can use to extract or reinstall Safari from this partition. So, following are the major use of recovery partition. Your Mac can be booted from recovery partition by holding the “CMD+R” keys together during boot up. Every Mac running OS X Lion and later has a small (650MB) hidden recovery partition called Recovery HD located on your Mac’s internal hard drive which is reserved for common utilities such as Time Machine Backup,Terminal utility, Disk Utility, Hardware Diagnostic tool and other built in set of utilities. This article will help you create a Mac OS X or macOS recovery USB drive to use in case of disaster or no boot from internal hard drive.

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