by Tom Nelson
Long ago, when cats ruled the Mac and OS X Lion was the king, Apple began including a hidden partition on the Mac’s startup device. Known as the Recovery HD, it was a special partition that could be used for troubleshooting a Mac, fixing common startup problems, or, if worse came to worst, reinstalling OS X.
Screen shot © Coyote Moon, Inc.
Pretty nifty, although nothing really new; competing computing systems offered similar capabilities.
But one thing that set the Mac’s Recovery HD system apart from others was that the operating system was installed using the Internet, by downloading a fresh install of OS X when needed.
Which brings us to the questions we’re going to answer in this article.