2016 MacBook Air stuck in recovery after erasing discs

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2016 MacBook Air stuck in recovery after erasing discs

I have a 2016 MacBook Air. I have been running it with Mojave ever since it came out. Switched to Catalina when that came out, computer got slow and kept freezing. Hated it. Went through the process of reinstalling Mojave, no issues. Fast forward to the present, and I updated to Monterey. What do you know, same darn thing happened, computer was slow, and kept freezing. Tried to reinstall Mojave since I still had the bootable on a USB stick drive. Did not look up the correct process (idiot, I am aware). Long story short, I pulled up the disk utilities menu after I rebooted the computer and I erased all three internal discs. The two labeled Macintosh HD - Data, and one labeled Update. Now I can’t get the computer to go anywhere other than the recovery menu. I tried to run the bootable with Mojave on it, and it seemed like it worked until the progress bar got to the end and stayed there. Left it overnight, no change. I know I screwed something up big time. I’m hoping someone can tell me if/how it’s fixable, or if I need to start looking for a new laptop. Thanks in advance for any help.

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 12.7

Posted on Feb 16, 2025 11:05 AM

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Answer 1

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AV8R317 Author

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Feb 17, 2025 5:53 AM in response to Lukcresdera

Thanks for the reply! I actually got it figured out! Turns out the usb stick I was using to make the bootable was formatted incorrectly and/or was a cheap one. Bought a new flash drive, formatted it correctly, and it worked! Data recovery wasn’t a problem since everything I had was in the cloud. Hoping that it will run better since hopefully everything not essential was wiped.

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Answer 2

Feb 16, 2025 9:02 PM in response to AV8R317

This is not all that helpful with data recovery, but I think I experienced something the same.

I had a 2013 13" Macbook Air that I went too far on updating the OS and got stuck in a loop trying to reinstall the OS. I had replaced the battery too not that long ago. It was slow as well because it was only an i5 with 8GB of RAM. All the software I was trying to run was just causing so many page faults. It would run hot all the time with loud fan noise. It was time to upgrade and stop wasting time on trying to get it to work.

I just bought a new to me but used MacBook Air M2 15" with 2tb and 24GB - the max configuration so its performance would last for a while. It is the best and quietest laptop I have owned - even thought it is used. No fans so there is no fan noise. For what I do - mostly email, web browser, word processing and powerpoint slides for work - it hardly ever gets warm. The MacBook Air is lighter than the MacBook Pro so that it is better to travel with. But the MacBook Pro has more ports and can support more external monitors out of the box. Going to the Apple store, the weight is what convinced me to go with the MacBook Air even though it has a 15 screen.

I run firefox web browser and there must be a memory leak with it because I find it hogging resources so I do have to reboot the system every other day to get better performance back. This happens on my MacStudio M1 as well with its 64gb of ram and its 2TB SSD.

Whatever laptop you choose, try to buy the maximum of RAM and largest SSD you can afford. The larger SSD will provide a larger virtual memory space and avoid wear out as much - having to rewrite flash memory locations less frequently. The larger RAM is a performance/heat issue so it will run faster with fewer page swaps into and out of memory and thereby reduce the heat generated that needs to be dissipated into air.

Hopefully you had a recent backup so you can get the data that you want.

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Answer 3

Feb 17, 2025 5:36 PM in response to AV8R317

Thank you for sharing your solution with the Community. 🙂👍🏽

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2016 MacBook Air stuck in recovery after erasing discs

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