Recovery partition missing after Time Machine restore of Lion

Question

I recently purchased a new hard drive for my macbook pro and restored my system to the new disc via a Time Machine backup of the old disc. Everything worked fine and my mac is running faster than ever thanks to the new drive
I just recently realized, however, that by using this method of restoration, the Lion recovery partition that was created during my first install is gone. This is probably due to it being a hidden partition that disc utility on my install disc was unable to recreate.
I verified that the partition is missing by downloading the new recovery tool that Apple released a few days ago. It failed to work because the partiton could not be found.
My question is if anyone else has realized this issue and if there is a solution. Is it possible to recreate the partition without going through an archive-and-reinstall routine? In my opinion this is a bit of a blunder by Apple as it renders Time Machine usless.
Thoughts? Suggestions?

Answer 1

Read the instructions for using the Recovery HD installation tool. You must make a small partition on the new hard drive of about 1 GB or so on which to install the Recovery HD.
To resize the drive do the following:
1. Open Disk Utility and select the drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list.
2. Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window. You should see the graphical sizing window showing the existing partitions. A portion may appear as a blue rectangle representing the used space on a partition.
3. In the lower right corner of the sizing rectangle for each partition is a resizing gadget. Select it with the mouse and move the bottom of the rectangle upwards until you have reduced the existing partition enough to create the desired new volume's size. The space below the resized partition will appear gray. Click on the Apply button and wait until the process has completed.  (Note: You can only make a partition smaller in order to create new free space.)
4. Click on the [+] button below the sizing window to add a new partition in the gray space you freed up. Give the new volume a name, if you wish, then click on the Apply button. Wait until the process has completed.
You should now have a new volume on the drive.
It would be wise to have a backup of your current system as resizing is not necessarily free of risk for data loss.  Your drive must have sufficient contiguous free space for this process to work.