Let me tell you about my latest odyssey…
Posted by
Mop (aka rburriel)
Oct 29 '21, 22:20
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You see, my goal is to install Big Sur on a 2019 MacBook Air. How hard can that be?
The MacBook Air belonged to a former employee. When I booted into recovery mode to wipe the computer and boot from a thumb drive with the Big Sur installer on it, I discovered that the drive was locked and could only be unlocked by the administrator’s Apple ID. Former employee was contacted by my boss and former employee released the computer from his iCloud account. After convincing the laptop to connect to wifi, I waited some hours and discovered that when I visited the drive’s security settings, it now said that there wasn’t an administrator account on the machine. Good enough. I deleted the partitions on the hard drive and rebooted to the thumb drive, at which point it continued to refuse to install anything from an external drive, so it’s onward to Apple’s internet recovery option. Which requires wifi. Except now it only allows me to connect to our lower grade wifi or the visitor’s network, except the lower grade wifi never connects and the visitor’s network option gives an error telling me that I’m connecting to a public wifi hotspot and it won’t let me do internet recovery from a public wifi. Time to take this laptop home and try it from there. Numerous attempts at internet recovery get me back to the drive security settings quick again tell me that this machine has no administrator account. I now realize that what it’s telling me is that without an administrator account, I cannot disable the lock on external drive access. So what now? Install the recovery OS on the MacBook Air and create an administrator account. Let’s do it! I install the recovery OS, which is Mojave (ON a 2019 MACBOOK AIR?!) I go through the whole process, create my admin account, get to the desktop, everything looks good… I reboot into recovery mode and go to the security utilities and sure enough, I can now use my admin account to disable all the security settings. I reboot and boot from the thumb drive and see an error I’ve never seen before… I need to install an update before I can do the install from the thumb drive. Hmm, OK. So I boot back into the desktop, do a spate of Mac OS updates, and try again. FINALLY! Now I can delete the partitions (again!) and install Big Sur from scratch.
I love how Apple makes installing MacOS like a puzzle. It’s a game that only the best can master!
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