You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

M1 Macbook Air Booted to recovery after Initial Setup

Having an issue with the new M1 Macbook Air trying to reinstall Big Sur. Out of the box after initial setup I rebooted the Air and it booted into recovery and needed Big Sur to be reinstalled. When in recovery attempting to install I keep getting the error "An error occurred preparing the update. Failed to personalize the the software update. Please try again"


I have tried going through recovery and also made a bootable usb of Big Sur and get the same results. I went to disk utility and have reformatted the drive, did first aid on the drive, but still cannot get big sur to install.


MacBook Air

Posted on Nov 18, 2020 1:14 PM

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Nov 20, 2020 8:42 PM

I figured it out. Have to boot to defuse mode. Here’s an article that explains how. This guy does a way better job than I would of explaining. https://mrmacintosh.com/how-to-reinstall-macos-on-your-apple-silicon-mac-everything-you-need-to-know/

Similar questions

2 replies

M1 Macbook Air Booted to recovery after Initial Setup

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.