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When trying to reinstall macOS High Sierra, the error says the recovery server could not be contacted. What do I do?

When trying to reinstall macOS High Sierra, the error says the recovery server could not be contacted. What do I do?

MacBook

Posted on Jan 1, 2021 3:33 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jan 1, 2021 4:08 PM

https://recoverit.wondershare.com/mac-tips/the-recovery-server-could-not-be-contacted.html


macos-recovery-server.md

I was trying to reinstall High Sierra on an older MacBook Air using internet recovery and I kept on getting an error message when trying to reinstall High Sierra.

The recovery server could not be contacted

It appears that this has to do with the time on the machine not being synchronized, so when the MacBook tries to reach out to the recovery server the certificates do not validate and we get this useless error message.

To fix this.

  1. Open up a Terminal from the utilities menu
  2. Enter the following command
ntpdate -u time.apple.com
  1. Try to install High Sierra again. It should just work™.


https://gist.github.com/levlaz/16b63384bd5e1bee3593be0d91aedbd7

4 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jan 1, 2021 4:08 PM in response to kaileybd10

https://recoverit.wondershare.com/mac-tips/the-recovery-server-could-not-be-contacted.html


macos-recovery-server.md

I was trying to reinstall High Sierra on an older MacBook Air using internet recovery and I kept on getting an error message when trying to reinstall High Sierra.

The recovery server could not be contacted

It appears that this has to do with the time on the machine not being synchronized, so when the MacBook tries to reach out to the recovery server the certificates do not validate and we get this useless error message.

To fix this.

  1. Open up a Terminal from the utilities menu
  2. Enter the following command
ntpdate -u time.apple.com
  1. Try to install High Sierra again. It should just work™.


https://gist.github.com/levlaz/16b63384bd5e1bee3593be0d91aedbd7

When trying to reinstall macOS High Sierra, the error says the recovery server could not be contacted. What do I do?

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