Reinstalling Mac OS - no ethernet, blank screen after boot drive?
Issue is occurring on model A2179
so tldr; needed to wipe laptop, brought to the genius bar (would have done myself but thought it was locked behind an icloud acct - long story, not stolen though lol). They took it to the back and called me later and said that it needed a new logic board and was going to cost $700+ which, no thank you. Partner is a software engineer so I figured we'd give it a go ourselves before trashing it.
So here's the thing - when I brought it in to the store, it had an OS installed. It brought it to the recovery menu but it was pretty laggy which was odd. That was all I really saw them do before taking it back. When I got it back though, upon turning on it just shows a blank screen with a folder symbol with a ? in the middle. It has a link at the bottom to go to a setup page on apple's website.
Basically, it looks like apple wiped the OS and now we're having a hard time reinstalling it, which is annoying. Crated a boot drive but when we have tried to use it we encounter a few issues:
- it won't connect to the wifi. It just loads infinitely and nothing happens
- we skip wifi and select the boot usb drive, it goes to a black screen and doesnt seem to do anything even after sitting for hours.
- it connects to wifi, but nothing else works - selecting the boot from usb button does nothing. Not even the black screen seen before.
- Attempted using ethernet instead of wifi, but doesnt seem to detect the adapter (using a tplink usb c to ethernet adapter - we couldn't find any official apple one but if this is part of the problem let me know)
- boot media menu is less laggy than internet selection menu so first booting into boot media then command r to internet recovery it also infinitely loops
If anyone has any insight into what this might be, please do let us know. We're hoping it isn't actually a logic board issue because it isn't worth fixing if so but if this seems to indicate loose connections or something else, any insight would be appreciated!
TIA
