first time ever stumped, fresh yosemite reinstall on new mac - edit all good, worked it out

[ObsoleteAcc99]

Hi there,

today i received my 2014 refurbished model 2.8ghz macbook pro with 1tb flash drive and 16gb ram. I was very excited as it's my first machine in 5 years

(and before anyone asks, yes i AM broke but my parents got this from me as a thank you cause I am moving back in with them for a while to help with some expenses by renting this house out).

Anyway, cause I am OCD, bad, i decided i just wanted to do a fresh install from scratch of the latest (and likely last) version, 10.10.5

rather than do upgrades (installed is 10.10.2).

So i restarted the machine and pressed alt so i could boot into recovery partition to format. There was no recovery partition. Hmm.

I went back into the main OS and did some searching and it seems on some yosemite installs you need to press command R to get into the recovery.

So I did that, all good. Opened disk utility. Only drive appearing is the macintosh HD. I highlighted it, formatted it, restarted the machine - and the recover partition is gone!

Now this is where I am stumped.. how is this even *possible*? If i was formatting the mac HD *using* the recovery partition, how did it delete a volume i was using? LOL

Anyway on reboot when i hit command R, it started "internet" recovery. On my adls it's going to take a couple of hours, but hopefully it will automatically install the latest version.

Can someone confirm for me, that if one deletes their boot drive using the recovery partition, that it indeed does require internet recovery to re install after?

I am waiting, there is 60 mins to go. I presume all will be ok.

Just really curious as to whether my computer is faulty or that's normal.

Anyway we saved $770 by getting this one.. the only difference in the 2015 2.8ghz is the 5% faster radeon graphics (i prefer nvidia anyway), the force touchpad, and faster flash (i got 1015 mb/s with aja system test on the current one, i think I will live ) it's actually using an identical haswell processor. And i like that apparently with the refurbs they stress test them so people say they are the ones to get as they are rarely ever faulty. I also have a brand new battery in it on it's first cycle, and it was spotless, so i am very happy.

It's like going from a hyundai to a ferrari LOL.

I also noticed that when the cpu is hammered the fans only spin up to half what they did in the 2011 model (got mine jan 2011, ok so not quite[/] 5 years), so basically, they are WAY quieter. Although the fans on the 2.8 do spin up a bit more than the ones on my sister's 2.5 (same year), but haswell obviously has WAY better thermals than sandy.

Cheers and thanks.

[xNiMiNx]

Well, im not familiar with the exact software you used so stop reading here if you want.

The recovery partition on a lot of laptops is on the same hd that the OS is on, just partitioned into two. If the software gives you a choice of formatting drive 0, or partition 1, or partition 2, and you select drive 0, i would assume that it would format the entire drive, OS and recovery partition.

As for how it is possible, the software could have been loaded into ram when you booted into it.

[ObsoleteAcc99]

it's ok i worked it out, thanks. Yosemite converts the drive to core storage due to encryption (optional) and partitions can't be altered so formatting one screws up the other. It can only be one big partition.

the internet recovery installed a fresh 10.10.5, just for curiosity i followed instructions on the web to convert it back to HFS+ (make sure encryption disabled before you try this), which i did, i also made a usb boot disk for yosemite 10.10.5 following apple's instructions (super easy, took 60 seconds on a usb 3 flash drive), and then deleted the recovery partition, made it all one big partition, formatted it, then reinstalled fresh from the boot disk. I have reclaimed all space and now it's correctly showing just the OS and the newly created recovery partition from the last install. It was showing several smaller partitions and not the full space of the main disk before i did this..

I decided to keep it at corestorage cause i have no intentions of using bootcamp or ever deleting the recovery partition again plus i enabled filevault 2 which is pretty secure, and that HAS to use the core storage partition.

it's stupid they don't explain this up front and there are hundreds of topics on the web how users can no longer re partition stuff.. very weird that they expect everyone to work it out for themselves. I actually thought it was a faulty machine for a while. I just expected the file system to be the same that I was used to the past 7 years and was treating it as such.

Anyway it's working like lightning now, encryption has only dropped the flash drive performance by 1 or 2% and i reckon it's worth it cause the entire drive is locked, it's not just certain files or folders.