OS X 10.8 with Recovery Partition?

[Appleboy45]

Personally, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion is my favorite OS X. I plan to buy a MacBook with this OS. Does it have a recovery partition? I plan to do a fresh restoration of the OS when I get the laptop.

[ALwin]

If you do a clean install, I think the recovery partition will be created by the OS.  Not sure, check on the Mac/Apple forums.

[DHelios]

While it may have a recovery partition, it may not do you much good.

 

The OS X recovery partitions hold useful tools like Disk Utility and Terminal, but though the option to start a recovery is there the required installation data isn't. It will download this information off the internet. It's basically the same as what you get when you boot into Internet Recovery by holding down Command+R during boot.

 

Over here, at least, OS X versions prior to El Capitan are no longer available in the Mac App Store, and can as such not be downloaded by the installer (they instead give an error that this program is 'temporarily unavailable'. Temporarily, yeah right!). This may just be a regional thing though.

 

You'll need a separate installation medium such as a CD (which you may still be able to purchase directly from Apple, I know they sell Snow Leopard for € 19.99) or a USB stick. Creating a new install USB stick however requires you to download Mountain Lion from... you guessed it, the Mac App Store...

[AlphaGamer46]

I don't think you can even buy OS X Mountain Lion.

 

I know you can buy OS X Snow Leopard still because of the older Macs that still run Leopard that can run newer OSes.

 

You can also buy Lion because a lot of the early Intel Macs can only run Lion as their max OS.

 

Good luck with buying it, it'll be very hard. I tried to find a copy of OS X Mavericks to revert back to it from Yosemite but couldn't and don't download it from third party websites. A lot of the time they've got viruses and malware that can let the website or other people directly hack into your computer.

 

Look on eBay because I know people sell USB installers for Snow Leopard, Lion, Mavericks and Yosemite but I'm not sure about Mountain Lion.

 

If I was you, I'd run Mavericks on that Mac because it's newer and the performance is pretty good on older Macs. Plus, it'll have support for longer over Mountain Lion.

[Appleboy45]

For those wondering, Apple still does sell10.8, look up OS X Mountain Lion and click the first link.

[DHelios]

12 hours ago, Appleboy45 said:

For those wondering, Apple still does sell10.8, look up OS X Mountain Lion and click the first link.

I've been feverishly holding onto my OS X 10.6/7/8/9/10 install media and a pile of back-ups just in case. It's good to know they can still be replaced!

 

You may want to add those twenty bucks to the projected cost for your new MacBook if you plan to reinstall it at any point. Looks like you've found your answer