How to Partition New Bootable Drive to Include Recovery Partition

According to a post by SuperDuper's developer, reinstalling OS X over an existing installation adds a missing recovery partition:

Actually, you can easily recreate the recover partition by simply reinstalling Lion from the App Store. (This has the additional benefit of updating the recover partition with the most recent data, too.)

https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/27102 says the same thing:

I installed a larger drive in my MBP and cloned my original disk to the new drive using SuperDuper! This process doesn't create the restore partition. Reinstalling Lion onto the new drive created the necessary partition for me.

I reinstalled this using the "USB Key" installer run from a partition on an external drive. My User accounts, applications, etc. survived the reinstall but I did have to run the updaters for the OS and reinstall Java after the Lion reinstall.

Reinstalling OS X from the App Store (or using an installer app you have already downloaded) is probably easier than using an external drive though.

Above, "reinstalling OS X" means doing an upgrade install over the current installation. See Apple's KB article OS X Mountain Lion: Reinstall OS X.

Simply upgrading to 10.8 or 10.9 would probably also add a recovery partition.