High Sierra “The Recovery Server Could Not Be Contacted” Error. FIXED 2024

No matter what i try i cannot restore high sierra on to my Imac 2011- its highest supported OS.

I have spent countless hours trying to restore an old iMac 2011, I tried to create a bootable USB unfortunately the Mac I was using did not support High Sierra OS -2019 MacBook pro. After multiple attempts of resetting the date and time- to current time and different times as other post suggest, trying internet recovery, local recovery, and different formats on the internal storage; I was at a loss. With just the right amount of luck I found the solution! Thank you to Mr. Macintosh on YT he goes in depth to what the issue is on his video and site. Please find the solution below and hopefully save yourself a headache.

TLDR: The problem is when high sierra installer tries to contact the URL, it cannot due to a communication error caused by SSL.

Solution 1

if your mac supports masOS Mojave or newer try Internet Recovery as they do not have this issue.

you can do so restarting your mac and immediately pressing option-command-R

if not your probably in the same boat I was in.

Your solution is to change the URL http://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-10.13-10.12-10.11-10.10-10.9-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog"

you do this in terminal. open utilities and open terminal - you can do this!! your input should look like the final command at the bottom of this.. its suggested you type it manually as it is case sensitive.

https://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-10.13-10.12-10.11-10.10-10.9-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog

to

http://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-10.13-10.12-10.11-10.10-10.9-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog

final command will look like

nvram IASUCatalogURL="http://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-10.13-10.12-10.11-10.10-10.9-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog"

quit terminal and retry macOS high sierra installer and should work!

Huge thanks ro mrmacintosh on yt for this info, i hope this helps someone out there!