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Issues with creating Bootable Rescue Media on Mac - my solution

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I'm posting this for anybody else who may have had a similar issue...

I have been back and forth with support trying to figure out why I was unable to create Bootable Rescue Media. The error that kept coming up was that it could not find a compatible version of the Mac Recovery Partition, which it needs to create the Media.

It appears that when one upgrades to Sierra OSX, the upgrade does not update the Recovery Partition. They are trying to get people to now use Internet Recovery. So, I was stuck...

So, on support's advice, I tried recreating the Recovery Partition with the third-party app, Recovery Partition Creator 4.0. However, at the last point before clicking proceed, it told me that doing this would make my Bootcamp partition unreadable, which, for me, was unacceptable.

...until I went back to Recovery Partition Creator 4.0 and saw that it was possible to create the Recovery Partition on an external drive. NOTE that the external drive MUST have a GUID Partition system, NOT an MBR, so, in my case, I needed to reformat the drive before using it. In addition, one must have a copy of the OSX installation file, in my case Sierra, but I suspect it will work with any OSX you are running.

Once the Recovery Partition was on the external drive and I had successfully tested it, I went back to True Image and tried to create the Bootable Rescue Media. NOTE, though, that one MUST have the Recovery Partition external drive attached for this to work, because True Image looks for a compatible Recovery Partition. One must also have compatible media for the Rescue media... e.g. some PC-formatted drives with extra locked partitions will not work, in my case, Western Digital, whom I have long hated... by that's another story!

Once I had all the pieces in place, the Rescue Media was created, and I'm a happy man! :-)

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Thanks for the feedback and work-a-round.

I have a standard image I would build for Macintosh deployment at my old job.  I would use the 10.10.x installer thumb drive native recovery/parition tool (since that is the last version that lets you take a disk image without having to backup the unused space as well) and found it to be very capable.

However, while going that route, I also found that anytime you upgrade the OS with the next version of OS X from application updates, the recovery partion did not upgrade (looks like that's the same issue here).  

So, I got in the habit of downloading the full version of the installer from Apple and running that as an in-place upgrade on my image and that would upgrade the recovery partition as well.  That may be another possibilty for Sierra, but I no longer have a system capable of running it so have not been able to test.