Problem
Mountain Lion is downloaded directly from the App store. When it installs it creates a small hidden partition on your hard drive by default called Recovery HD. If you ever need to recover your Operating System you can access this via booting into the recovery. But because both the operating system and the recovery are stored on one hard-drive you may encounter issues running this recovery partition if the system disk has become dysfunctional.
It is therefore advised that you create a minimal OS X recovery disc in case you experience any issues with accessing your recovery partition.
Your Mac must have a local hidden Recovery HD partition; If you are unsure whether your Mac has one please follow this link to ensure it does:
You need an external disk with 1GB space minimum in order to continue.
Your account must be an Admin Account to do this.
Solution
- Download the “OS X Recovery Disk Assistant” from the following link: support.apple.com/kb/DL1433
- Click on the Download button
- Please ensure that before you run the RecoveryDiskAssistant.dmg file you must make sure that the external drive you will be using is in the format Mac OS Extended (Journaled) If you are unsure how to check this or need help formatting your drive into this type, then please follow this fix.
- Navigate to your downloads folder (by default to the right of your dock by the trash) and click on it to show its content.
- Open RecoveryDiskAssistant.dmg
- Navigate to the Utilities folder by launching Finder and using the shortcut Command-Shift-U
- Click “Authenticate” and then enter your User password.
- Once copied over, open the Recovery Disk Assistant from the Utilities folder and click Open.
- In the license agreement, click Agree
- It will then display a message that say “Connect a USB drive, select the disk and then click continue” Please plug in your external drive (which you have ensured or recently formatted to Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) from step 3)
- Select the drive and click Continue
- Authenticate this by entering in your password
- Please wait a few minutes as it creates the recovery disk.
- Once completed quit the application and eject both the mounted image and the external disk from your desktop.