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Cannot start into Recovery or Internet Recovery on a 2017 Intel MacBook Pro w/Touch Bar running macOS Monterey

My 2017 Intel MacBook Pro w/Touch Bar has a broken display, and I am looking to dispose of the machine. However, I first would like to wipe my information by erasing the hard disk and re-installing macOS. As background, I can successfully connect to an external monitor once the system boots to the login window, but for recovery mode the computer does not recognize the external display. After many weeks of trying ideas - I disconnected the internal laptop display and now I can see the screen on the external monitor as it boots.

Which then led me to my next problem - when attempting to boot into Recovery or Internet Recovery via Command-R, the apple logo appears, and that’s it. No progress bar. I’ve left it for more than 12 hours in that state multiple times to no avail.

What have I tried? I cleared the PRAM and reset the SMC. I upgraded from Big Sur to Monterey as that would “lay down” a fresh recovery partition - no luck. I created an external USB installer but apparently cannot boot from it as the machine has “external boot” locked down (and you need recovery mode to enable external boot). I've successfully booted in target mode, but you cannot install macOS onto a machine in target mode.

I am open to ideas on what to try next. The answer may be “Apple Store Appointment” but I don’t want to pay for a repair if I am simply disposing of the machine. Thank you!

MacBook Pro (2017 – 2020)

Posted on Apr 24, 2023 8:01 AM

Top-ranking reply

Grant Bennet-Alder

Level 10

132,997 points

Posted on Apr 24, 2023 9:23 AM

if you get the solid Apple on the display, your Mac is working. What is on the drive, or the drive itself may not be quite right, but you likely do not have other festering hardware issues.

The absolute simplest thing your Mac can do is Startup Manager (aka Boot Picker.) This code is all in ROM, and no drives need to be working at all.

Hold Option at startup and it should draw a gray screen. Then over the next several minutes, it will derive what drives are bootable by trying every possibility. If any potentially-bootable drives are discovered, an icon will be added to the Startup Manager display. When the cycle is complete, the wait cursor will be replaced by a regular cursor.

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If that produces expected results, try Internet recovery, invoked with Option-Command-R. It can take up to a quarter hour to be ready to go, during which time a globe will spin in an attempt to entertain you. This method creates more than 25 RAM disks to hold temporary items, but leaves your BOOT DRIVE completely unencumbered to be deeply repaired or erased.

Use macOS Recovery on an Intel-based Mac - Apple Support

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Cannot start into Recovery or Internet Recovery on a 2017 Intel MacBook Pro w/Touch Bar running macOS Monterey

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