Important update: Lately I’ve been having issues with CreateRecoveryPartitionInstaller creating an empty (unusable) recovery partition. I’m not the only one experiencing it, but the problem also doesn’t seem to be universal..

If you’re not getting this tutorial below to work for you, you might want to try this less elegant workaround that totally did work for me.

Note: This is a sequel to Restoring a deleted recovery partition on a Mac, which details how to clone a recovery partition from a Mac that has one to another Mac that doesn’t have one.

There’s a great little tool I was only recently made aware of (thanks, @Sacrilicious) called Create Recovery Partition Installer. It takes an OS X Installer.app and extracts what’s necessary to create a package that makes a recovery partition. Here’s how it works…

You’re going to need an OS X Installer. Usually, this is something that will appear in your App Store purchases if you’ve ever upgraded OS X (e.g., from Mavericks to Yosemite). The download may take a while, depending on the speed of your Internet connection.

While that’s downloading, head over to Create Recovery Partition Installer and download the latest version as a .zip file and unzip it (usually double-clicking while suffice to unzip).

What you’ll see inside, along with a README file is an .app called Create Recovery Partition Installer.app. When your OS X Installer finishes downloading, you’ll find it in your /Applications folder. Go ahead and drag that OS X Installer.app onto the Create Recovery Partition Installer.app, and you’ll see a window appear that says Downloading RecoveryHDUpdate.dmg….

That window will stay that way for a long time… several minutes. Just let it run.

After several minutes is up, you’ll see a prompt for where to save the recovery partition installer .pkg file. I just picked Downloads, but you can pick any folder, as long as you can find the .pkg file later.

Once it’s done saving the .pkg file, you can click Quit.

Then, on the computer that needs the recovery partition, go ahead and run the installer.

The rest of the prompts should be fairly intuitive…

Then, when it’s done, you should have the recovery partition created on that machine.