Introduced in OS X Lion, Internet Recovery is a great feature if you find that your internal recovery partition isn’t available because your hard drive stopped responding or you installed a new hard drive without OS X installed.
Internet Recovery works by using settings in your computer firmware to automatically direct the Mac to use Internet Recovery. The Mac will start directly from Apple’s Servers.
Any Macintosh Manufactured after OS X Lion was announced last Summer will automatically have this feature built-in. However, if you have bought a mac in the last couple of years, don’t worry. You’re Mac can be upgraded to use this feature but installing a firmware update.
The below computers require a firmware update to use the OS X Internet Recovery feature:
- MacBook Pro (13-inch, Early 2011)
- MacBook Pro (15-inch, Early 2011)
- MacBook Pro (17-inch, Early 2011)
- iMac (21.5-inch, Mid 2011)
- iMac (27-inch, Mid 2011)
- MacBook (13-inch, Mid 2010)
- MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2010)
- Mac mini (Mid 2010)
- MacBook Pro (15-inch and 17-inch, Mid 2010)
- iMac (21.5-inch and 27-inch, Mid 2010)
- MacBook Air (11-inch and 13-inch, Late 2010)
Note: Firmware updates may not be automatically displayed when running Software Update however. If they do not appear, manually download the update from the Apple Downloads site.