What to do if Mac Internet Recovery won't work or you can't boot into Mac recovery mode. Plus how to enter Recovery on an M1 Mac.

Mountain Lion, like Lion before it, lets you boot your Mac into a special recovery mode called OS X Recovery. This mode includes a few essential utilities for fixing problems, restoring files ...

It is also possible to install Lion on external storage devices, including Thunderbolt drives and memory cards, and boot into the operating system or Lion Recovery from an external drive.

This new Internet Recovery then passes off to the standard Lion Recovery mode that is available to all OS X Lion installed Macs. Internet Recovery is only available on newly-introduced Macs.

The OS X 10.9 Mavericks installer from the Mac App Store in your Applications folder. The installer will delete itself when you install the operating system, but it can be re-downloaded if necessary.