If your Mac is running a version of macOS older than Sierra (which launched in 2016) then you won’t have all the Recovery options available that you may have heard of.

We’ll look at what to do in that case later.

If your Mac is really old – as in so old it’s running Mac OS X Snow Leopard or older – it will not have a Recovery partition, the only way to reinstall the OS is to use the discs that shipped with the Mac.

New ways to do things on M1 Macs, but we’ll also discuss it below. If that sounds like you there is a new way to enter Recovery on an M1 Mac.

Number one reason right now is that your Mac is a M1 Mac – one of the new Macs introduced since November 2020 which uses one of Apple’s new processors rather than Intel.

A problem, but luckily there are solutions available. It’s a problem if you need to reinstall the operating system from scratch and the Recovery partition is missing or for some reason you can’t access. But there are actually four partitions, and one is used in extreme cases where you may want to completely reinstall the operating system macOS (or Mac OS X on really old Macs).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. 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 partitions 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.

Mac os x utilities at boot