Install OS X on a hard drive without internet recovery

It is possible that some hard drives, whether operational or corrupt, do not have a system recovery partition, so we will see how to install OS X if you need it again without going through "the ring" either of internet recovery, thus wasting much more time.

As you can imagine, the new Macs built from 2010 include an option from the start to access the internet recovery option and that it would help us to download the system image that would normally be stored in the OS X recovery partition and thus run the diagnostics if necessary.

This online recovery mode was a necessary option for a long time because if the disc is damaged leaving blankAt least we could reinstall the system and check the integrity of said hard drive, otherwise the recovery partition would surely be rendered useless. Even so, if your Mac was launched before 2010 (even if you update to the latest version of OS X), you will not be able to enjoy said internet recovery option so it can cause us too much annoyance if we just changed the hard drive and we need to reinstall .

We have three possibilities to achieve our goal:

• External recovery unit: One option is that if we have changed the hard drive for a new one, remove the old one to an external drive and connect it to the Mac and then with a cloning program, dump the content on the new drive. However if the old disk is faulty, it could cause problems and not be feasible.
• Install OS X 10.6 with DVD: Another option is to reinstall the version of OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard using the DVDs that come with the system or that we bought at the time. Once installed, we should only update again through the Mac App Store to Mountain Lion where we should previously have the license.
• Recovery Disc Wizard: We can also think about installing Mountain Lion from scratch without the upgrade step. To achieve this we should have previously created an external recovery partition, if we had not created it we should then access another Mac to run the Recovery Disk Assistant to create said volume on the external drive. When we have it created we must connect it to our Mac with the ALT key pressed while we start it and that volume will appear. By clicking on it, it will lead us to the OS X tools to format the internal drive and reinstall OS X.

For this process it is also necessary to have the previously purchased license since when it begins to install it will ask us for our Apple ID which must be associated with the purchase of the system.

More information - Create OS X Installer on USB from Internet Recovery