Activation Lock status could not be determined

Question

Activation Lock status could not be determined

Hi,

something went wrong while trying to update Boot Camp drivers while in Mac OS Big Sur. The Bootcamp utility froze, and after rebooting the MBP I am not able to enter recovery mode either local or via the web.

The web recovery returns a fail after 5 minutes with the error code -2003F

When I try booting from a Catalina installed on an external SSD I get the following error:

"Security settings do not allow this Mac to use an external startup disk."

Holding down Command-R to open macOS Recovery does not lead to the Startup Security Utility but rather starts the online Recovery mode which always fails.

single user (command S at startup) mode starts but ends without prompting so I can't try fsck.

Any ideas on how I can get to the Recovery Utilities?

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 11.6

Posted on Dec 11, 2021 6:22 AM

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Answer 1

Dec 11, 2021 9:05 AM in response to Daniel Kohl 2

I was able to finally get into the Recovery Utility by booting from the Catalina system on the external SSD.

After booting to the freshly installed system I was asked to chose a language.
- I selected English (Since my MBP has a German keyboard I selected German last time and it failed directly with the "Security settings do not allow this Mac to use an external startup disk." error half in German and half in English.
- I was then requested to enter my AppleID (which was hard to do using a German keyboard with English mapping)
- After that I was able to access the usual recovery tools.
Unfortunately my MBP's internal (SSD?...Internal memory chips?) could not be mounted, or paired, I had to re-format them and am now restoring my system from a Time Machine back-up.

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Activation Lock status could not be determined

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