So, does anyone know how to do this properly? The Make Use Of page implies that Carbon Copy Cloner gives an option to restore the drive without including the recovery partition, but the details are not clear. Thankfully I was able to boot from the recovery stick and reinstall Sierra without even having to use my Time Machine backup. Upon reboot I saw the flashing folder icon labeled with a question mark (and it did not go away). Delete "Recovery HD" volume in Paragon's Hard Disk Manager (worked fine).Also, replace 'disk0' with whatever disk the partition is on. If its disk12s32, you want '32' instead of '3'. If Recovery HD is disk0s3, like mine, you want 3. Create a bootable recovery USB stick using Paragon Boot Media Builder Finally, to remove the Recovery HD partition, enter Code: gpt remove -i 3 disk0 Replace the '3' above with whatever partition number Recovery HD is.Back up system on Time Machine external hard drive.When it is removed, whether due to corruption or a mistake, the information sits on the hard drive until it is overwritten by new changes. A deleted partition on a hard disk is not a difficult fix with a dependable recovery tool.
Notably, the "Debug" panel is also gone from Disk Utility, so I took the suggestion from this thread to use the third-party Paragon software. If you recently deleted a partition on your Mac by mistake, there is an easy solution.
This is probably due to the switch from HFS to AppleCoreStorage as mentioned on this Make Use Of page. this guide for Snow Leopard), but I can't figure out how to do this in Sierra. Deleting the recovery partition seems straightforward for older versions of OS X (e.g.