Anyone help with some questions on missing recovery partition please??

[Rumplestilts]

Short story - bought an MBP of Ebay, (2016 with 500GB SSD). Seller has obviously used a clone of an existing installation to image the hard drive, and its formatted in HFS+.

I assume it would be much better for the machine to be running APFS, given its an SSD. However Disk Utility has greyed out the convert to APFS option. There is also no Recovery partition as a result of the cloning, which seems to be linked to the convert option not being available? I might have this wrong.

So my question is, what's the best route for me to convert to APFS?

I have an external SSD 500GB I can use, and a time machine back up. Or will an upgrade to Catalina mean this would automatically sort itself out on installation?

Thanks in advance..

B

 

[squiggy]

Use network restore and reformat / install a new system.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201314

 

[Rumplestilts]

You can't access that function without a recovery partition?

If I try and use command R it goes straight to internet recovery, which also doesn't work for me - but thanks

 

[chris_f]

You can't access that function without a recovery partition?

If I try and use command R it goes straight to internet recovery, which also doesn't work for me - but thanks

Internet recovery does not require a recovery partition. You need to use command-option-R.

 

[Rumplestilts]

ok thanks I will try again

 

[Rumplestilts]

nope - tried twice more. got a 2002f error which appears to be related to problems accessing the server

 

[Rumplestilts]

managed to get internet recovery to work after setting the DNS to 8.8.8.8 on my router. However when I select the "Reinstall OS" option it comes up with the warning:

You cannot do this. You already have a more recent version of the operating system installed

 

[Utwig]

Not apple expert but once I did this on empty drive. Boot Knoppix and zero beginning 10M and end 10M of partition. (or use some other utility). Then do network recovery.

 

[squiggy]

managed to get internet recovery to work after setting the DNS to 8.8.8.8 on my router. However when I select the "Reinstall OS" option it comes up with the warning:

You cannot do this. You already have a more recent version of the operating system installed

You should be reformatting anyway - go to disk utility (from the menubar iirc) and set up your drive as apfs first.

 

[Rumplestilts]

sorted - thanks all