Press the on button and press and hold the Command key and R on your keyboard while the Mac boots up.If you have an older Mac with an Intel processor this is what you need to do: Wait for the internet recovery screen to load.Choose your language and click on Next.Eventually you will be able to select Options > Continue and this will open up Recovery.Once a “Loading Startup Options” message appears you can let go of the Power button.When the Apple logo appears text will appear informing you that if you continue holding the power button you will be able to access startup options.Press the on button – and keep it pressed while the Mac starts up.If you need to reinstall the operating system from scratch and the Recovery partition is missing, or for some reason you can’t access it, it’s a problem, but luckily there are solutions available. We look in detail at what you can do in Recovery mode in a separate article. But there are actually four separate sections, and one is used in extreme cases where you may want to completely reinstall the operating system macOS (previously known as Mac OS X).Įven if you completely wipe your Mac, and start again from scratch, the Recovery partition should still be there to make it possible to reinstall macOS, restore from your Time Machine backup, and repair or erase your hard disk. You’re used to only seeing one room in the house, the one which has your Desktop, Folders and Applications. (Read: How to partition a Mac hard drive or SSD, or create a APFS volume for more information.) Think of your hard drive as the house, and the volumes as different rooms.

A hard drive is typically a single volume, but it is then split up into multiple areas, known as partitions or volumes. They just see the whole drive as one thing. Most people don’t really think about their hard drives (well, SSD these days) in terms of partitions.

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