How to delete macOS Recovery partition in Apple silicon device
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**My questions are:**
* How can I delete the 5.5GB Apple Recovery partition?
* Any massive reasons why I should *not* delete it?
**Why I want to delete it:**
My (M2 Air) has a fat ~5.5GB partition for "Apple_APFS_Recovery". Given the hard drive is 250GB this is a sizable proportion of my free space and I would rather use it.
Furthermore after some investigation this seems completely useless. The actual recovery boot interface comes from another 1.1GB partition within the 'Macintosh HD' group wich is updated with the system - macOS Sequoia 15.4.1 . This "Apple_APFS_Recovery" is stuk in the past with an old version of Sequoia. Apple calls this 1TR (One true recovery), but realistically seems a waste of space, I won't be reinstalling and old macOS any time soon, and in the **unlikely** case that my system fails so badly that I need to recover using that, I could always use a bootable USB with the latest system, or DFU restore from another Mac (even -worse case scenario- involving a trip to the Apple Store Genius Bar (i.e. worth using those 5GB in the meantime.
**What I have tried so far:**
So far I have tried booting from a Sequoia USB, and delete the partitions with Disk Utility and also
via command line. But I have not managed to, the security chip does simply not let me and i ended up having to DFU restore it a couple of times. I have also tried to make a USB with Ubuntu ARM64, to zero the whole thing but that doesn't seem to boot; and given the mac doesn't want to boot from USB once the partitions are deleted (hence the DFU restores) I doubt that would take me anywhere better. Any ideas? Or it is just undeletable and another way for apple to take away some of my hardrive abd bully us to buy bigger hardrives than the undecent 250GB.
For reference these are my partition details
list
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *251.0 GB disk0
1: Apple_APFS_ISC Container disk1 524.3 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_APFS Container disk2 245.1 GB disk0s2
3: Apple_APFS_Recovery Container disk3 5.4 GB disk0s3
/dev/disk2 (synthesized):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: APFS Container Scheme - +245.1 GB disk2
Physical Store disk0s2
1: APFS Volume Macintosh HD 11.2 GB disk2s1
2: APFS Snapshot com.apple.os.update-... 11.2 GB disk2s1s1
3: APFS Volume Preboot 6.1 GB disk2s2
4: APFS Volume Recovery 1.0 GB disk2s3
5: APFS Volume Data 63.9 GB disk2s5
6: APFS Volume VM 1.1 GB disk2s6
Asked by Jim
(9 rep)
May 9, 2025, 11:00 PM
Last activity: May 10, 2025, 12:45 AM
Last activity: May 10, 2025, 12:45 AM