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Recovering macOS Recovery

My Mac has two 500GB Samsung 850 Evo SSDs, one of which is its startup disk. I seem to be unable to access the macOS Recovery partition or the startup disk selector. Why?

Sometimes, macOS installations don’t work perfectly with non-standard hardware, and the first release of High Sierra seems to have had more problems than most, particularly with third-party SSDs.

The acid test of whether your startup disk contains a functional Recovery partition is to hold Cmd+R at startup to see if the Recovery system loads. If that doesn’t happen, the partition (normally hidden in Finder) is either absent or damaged beyond easy repair.

First, make sure you have a full backup of the whole drive’s contents. Next, if reinstalling your existing version of macOS over the top of itself doesn’t recreate the Recovery partition, the best course of action is to initialize that drive from the current release of High Sierra, and restore from your backup.

Although you could do this from Internet Recovery (hold Opt+Cmd+I or Shift+Opt+ Cmd+I at startup), it’s), Diskmaker X (), or Apple’s instructions for Terminal at .