[facecard]

On a Mac, does the recovery partition get overwritten EACH time you wipe the drive OR upgrade the OS? For example, I have a Mac Mini running Snow Leopard. If I want to reinstall the SL, obviously, I will use that OS to perform the installation. Most likely, I will use the DVDs to perform the installation.

Lets say, I wipe the drive and I perform a fresh install of Lion or Mavericks OR I perform an upgrade to Lion or some other OS version. Does the recovery partition get overwritten with a newer OS X?

How do I know which OS X version is on the recovery partition?

[Just_Me_D]

I just did this a few weeks back and I had the option to choose which partition to erase. I did not choose to erase the recovery partition. I chose the default MacHD partition or whatever the heck it’s called....

[facecard]

As I understand it, when you upgrade OR wipe the "system" drive and you install a fresh copy of OS X, regardless of OS X version, the recovery partition is affected as well.

For example, I have a Mac Mini server, this server came with Snow Leopard, currently it is running Mountain Lion. So, if I want to perform a recovery, it will look to Mountain Lion as the most recent OS X version and not SL which came with the server.

I would like to protect the recovery partition so it is not affected by an OS X upgrade OR a complete wipe and OS X reinstall.

[Just_Me_D]

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204904